Tutor: Katy Dellinger

Case Report

Introduction

Tutor: Katy Dellinger

Student: Brandon Cuellar

Age: 8 years old

Grade: Rising 2nd grader

As a graduate reading clinician in Appalachian State University’s Master’s Degree Program in Reading Education, I tutored Brandon Cuellar for 13 one-hour sessions across the summer, 2010 semester. I conducted an initial assessment during the first few days of tutoring, and I tutored Brandon during the following weeks. Brandon is 8 years old and will be a rising second grader at Icard Elementary School in Icard, North Carolina. Based on my assessment of Brandon, he struggles with word recognition in isolation, reading rate, reading comprehension, and oral reading accuracy.

Initial Literacy Assessments

A battery of informal, diagnostic literacy assessments were administered to Brandon, including a Reading Attitude Survey, an Interest Inventory, the Schlagal Spelling Inventory, an Early Reading Assessment, a Word Recognition in Isolation (WRI) test, a contextual reading test, a listening comprehension test, a sense of story assessment, and oral and written composition samples were analyzed.

A student’s independent level in a particular area is the highest at which he or she can successfully work without instructional support. The instructional level is the optimal level for working with instructional support. One’s frustration level is that at which he or she can not readily benefit even with instructional support.

Brandon arrived the first day with much enthusiasm. He was very energetic and it was a bit of a challenge to keep him focused on one piece of information at a time. It seems as though Brandon struggles severely with his reading skills, but he still seems to have a good attitude. He enjoys being praised for doing something well, and he likes to be rewarded.

Interest and Reading Attitude Survey

During the first tutoring session, the tutors spend about 15 minutes or so getting to know a little bit about their student that they will be working on. The interest inventory is a list of 18 statements that the tutor reads to the student and has the student fill in the blank. This is a way to find out what the student likes to do such as hobbies. The most important information that the interest inventory can tell us, as tutors, are possible topics for the students to write or read about. The reading attitude survey is completed after the interest inventory. The reading attitude survey is important because it tells us how the child feels about reading. In this survey there are 20 questions with four choices the student can choose from. The answer choices are expressions by the Garfield character. They show an excited Garfield, a mediocre Garfield, a bored Garfield, and a mad Garfield. The tutor will read each statement and the child will circle the expression of Garfield that best represents their feelings about that particular statement. This reading survey compares how the child feels reading for pleasure (recreational) versus reading at school as a requirement (academic). The information provided by this survey will tell us if the child has a negative attitude towards reading in general or if they enjoy it, but only when they can read what they want to read. If the scores from the survey indicates that the student has a negative attitude towards reading then it lets teachers or tutors know that the child will not read enough within a year to make enough progress. Researchers say that a child reading on grade level will read 90 minutes a day, and this is what allows them to make the progress they need in order to make a year’s progress in reading. If a child is reading below grade level and has a negative attitude towards reading, then the child will not make the progress they need in reading. The discrepancy between their grade level and reading level will only increase at this rate.

Based on the results of Brandon’s interest inventory and attitude survey, it seems as though Brandon enjoys playing video games and playing outside with his friends. Reading is not something Brandon likes to do very much. He definitely does not like reading in school, but based on his results if he reads it is during recreational time when it is something he can choose. He scored in the 15th percentile on the reading attitude survey. This means that he enjoys reading more than 15% of the children in his same age group. This is not very high, so this indicates to me that Brandon does not enjoy reading. This could possibly be because he is a struggling reader and it is frustrating to him. It is important for Brandon to be taught reading on his instructional level in order for Brandon to make any progress and become successful in his reading ability.

Spelling

The assessment that was given to Brandon for spelling was the Schlagal Spelling Inventory, a series of grade-leveled lists of words that a student is asked to spell as best as he/she can. There are eight levels of words, each level consisting of 12 words. First of all it tells us at what level to begin word study instruction in spelling and phonics. When studying a child’s errors in spelling, we can also determine what the particular child knows and does not know. A child’s spelling and word recognition are highly correlated with one another. A spelling assessment, like a test of word recognition, presents to us the child’s working knowledge of how letters work in words is a good indicator of how the child uses them in words.

One’s independent level in spelling/phonics is considered to be the highest at which the child spells at least 90% of the words in a given list correctly. One’s instructional level is considered to be the highest at which the child spells at least 50% of the words in a given list correctly. The frustration level is that at which one spells fewer than 50% of the words in a given list correctly. The test administrator should stop the test when the child misspells 8 or more of the 12 words in a list incorrectly.

As with any child who would be given the spelling assessment, I started Brandon with the first grade list and stopped the administration there because he only spelled one word correctly.

Level 1 – 8%

Based on Brandon’s spelling score, an instructional and independent level was unable to be determined. It is very clear that the first grade level for spelling is his frustration level.

An analysis of Brandon’s spelling, shows that he represents every phoneme with a letter. He has an initial consonant for every word, a final consonant, and a vowel is represented in every word. Some examples include: BAD for “bed”, SISTR for “sister”, BIC for “bike”. Another thing that I noticed in his spelling is his use of letter-name associations, which is to be expected at his level of spelling. An example includes: JRIF for “drive”. F and V are minimal pairs with each other so this was a logical substitution for Brandon. Also we see that he is spelling the word “drive” the way it sounds in the beginning with the /j/ sound of the letter name. Another example of this includes: JROP for “drop”. This is also a logical substitution because the sound of the letter name for /j/ is actually what you hear instead of the /d/ sound. He also spelled CHAP for “trap”. This is a logical substitution as well because you actually hear the /ch/ sound. Therefore, Brandon has difficulties with differentiating consonant blends and digraphs. However, he did spell “ship” correctly. Based on Brandon’s spelling, he is right at the end of the letter-name stage and beginning the within word stage of spelling. Therefore, we will be working on short vowel families and then move on to short vowel sorts and digraphs and blends.

Early Reading Screening Inventory

The Early Reading Screening Inventory is administered to beginning readers. After giving the spelling assessment, any child who misses 8 or more words on the first grade spelling list is given this assessment.

There are four components of the early Reading Screening Inventory. The first one is the alphabet task. The child names the upper-case letters and then the lower-case letters as the teacher points to them in random order. The child then writes the lower-case letters as the teacher dictates them in random order. The purpose of this part of the test is to determine if the student knows the letters of the alphabet by their name first of all and to determine if the child can recognize them written different ways, upper and lower-case. The next step in the ERSI (Early Reading Screening Inventory) is the concept of word in text. In this part of the assessment the child finger-point reads four sentences after the teacher models reading while finger-pointing to each sentence (4 points) and attempts to identify two target words within each sentence when the examiner points to the words (8 points). A child with a firm grasp of the spoken word-written word match in reading should score 10 or higher on this twelve-point task. The child will read out of a book called the “Katie Book”, which the examiner has already prepared. This part of the test indicates whether or not the child has a concept of word. The spelling task is the next part of this assessment. On the spelling task, the child attempts a sound-it-out spelling of six words dictated by the teacher. The six words (back, feet, step, jump, road, dig) include twenty possible sounds or phonemes. The sound-it-out spellings indicates the child’s phonemic awareness and determines whether or not the child can attend the sequence of sounds within spoken words. For every phoneme represented in a word, a child receives a point. This helps us to determine if a child understands phonemes in words and that every sound must have a letter/letters to represent that sound. The last task is the word-recognition task. The child attempts to read five frequently occurring sight words (is, me, cat, and, the) and five decodable words (pin, lap, met, job, nut). A score of five or higher on this ten-word test indicates that the child can probably read simple stories.

Brandon correctly identified all of the upper-case letters in the alphabet task. He named the lower-case “l” an “i”, which is a reasonable mistake. When asked to write the letters, he wrote “z” for the letter “v”. For the concept of word task, he correctly followed the directions by finger-pointing while reading and then identifying the specific words. He missed one on the last page: “You are a very bad dog.” When I pointed at the word “bad” and asked him to tell me what it was he said he did not know. On the spelling test, Brandon received a score of 20. For every word he represented an initial consonant sound, a medial vowel, and a final consonant sound. These were his spellings:

BAC for “back”

FIT for “feet”

STAP for “step”

JOMP for “jump”

ROBE for “road”

BIG for “dig”

Based on his spellings he has correctly identified pre-consonant nasals. He also correctly identified the consonant blend in the word “step”. However, he seems to struggle with correctly producing b’s and d’s in the words ROBE for “road” and BIG for “dig”. On the word recognition test, Brandon correctly identified 9 out of 10 of the words, which indicates to us that he should be able to read simple stories.

Word Recognition in Isolation

The assessment of word recognition in isolation gives us an interpretation as to whether or not automatic sight word recognition is an issue in a child’s contextual reading performance. It is also a good indication as to whether or not has good decoding skills based on the discrepancy of flashed vs. untimed scores. Fluent contextual reading requires one to be able to recognize most words automatically. The assessment of word recognition in isolation consists of grade-leveled words from the pre-primer level through the eighth grade level. For each level there is a list of 20 words. For each level there are two scores: flashed and untimed. The test administrator will first flash the words to the child for one-fourth of a second and asked the child to read that word. If the child can, then the administrator will quickly proceed to the next word in the list. If the child can not identify the word after being flashed the word for one-fourth of a second, the child is shown the word again, but this time it is presented to the child without being timed. The test administrator should stop the test when the child’s flashed score drops below 50%.

A child’s independent level in word recognition in isolation is considered to be the highest level at which the child can recognize at least 90% of the words correctly on the flashed presentation. The instructional level for a child in word recognition in isolation is considered to be the highest level at which he/she can recognize at least 60% of the words correctly on the flashed presentation. A child’s frustration level is the highest level at which the child’s score for the flashed presentation drops below 50%. For establishing these levels, the untimed scores can be used at the pre-primer and primer levels. I began this assessment with the pre-primer level list and stopped the administration at the primer grade level since Brandon’s score dropped below 50% in the flashed presentation.

Level PP – Flash 50% Untimed 80%

Level P – Flash 30% Untimed 60%

After administering the word recognition in isolation to Brandon it seems as though he struggles with identifying words correctly. He does not have a very big sight vocabulary because he easily confuses the words such as “where” for “here” and “why” for “who”. It also seems that he was confusing short-vowels and long-vowels by saying “pet” instead of “pat” and “run” instead of “rain”, which is what his letter-name spelling predicts.

Because Brandon did not score any higher than 50% on any of the timed presentations, I would say that there is no indication of an independent level. The instructional range for Brandon is pre-primer to primer because at these levels you can go by the untimed scores, and Brandon scored 80% on the untimed at PP2 and a 60% at P. It is safe to say that Brandon’s frustration level is the primer level and anything higher because his flash score was a 30% and he could not decode eight of the words in the untimed presentation.