Assessment Report for Alex Salazar
March 8, 2011Larissa Newman
Observation Survey of Literacy Achievement
Letter ID
Score: 52, Stanine: 5
In this assessment task students are asked to identify all 26 upper and lowercase letters; either by letter name, a word that starts with that letter, or a sound the letter makes.
Alex could identify all of the letters, but 2, by letter name. He did this quickly with only 2 confusions (i/l, p/q).
Concepts about Print
Score: 17, Stanine: 4
In this assessment, the student gets the opportunity to show what they know about how print works when they read a book.
Alex has most of the early behaviors of reading under control (front of book, print contains message, L-R, LP-RP, return sweep, word by word matching, 1st/Last concept, and punctuation (period, question mark), letters, words). He didn’t seem to be fully attending to the print when letters, words, or lines were altered.
Hearing and Recording Sounds
Score: 30, Stanine: 4
This task requires the student to hear and record individual sounds in words as a story is dictated. The sentence dictation to the student was: I have a big dog at home. Today I am going to take him to school.
Alex seemed to have a quick problem solving system while recording his words. He wrote his known words quickly and quietly articulated the unknowns and recorded most consonants and vowels. He also showed possible b/d confusion here. He understands the print boundaries (letter formation, spacing, left to right), although punctuation was lacking.
Writing Vocabulary
Score: 37, Stanine: 5
This task requires the student to write as many correctly spelled words as possible in 10 minutes.
Alex seems to have a growing vocabulary of writing words that he knows quickly. He wrote 12 words before being prompted. He can write words by using analogy (using other words he knows). His words were clear to read and in a list format.
Ohio Word Test
Score: 16, Stanine: 6
This task asks students to read 20 high-frequency words.
Alex could quickly recognize many of the words on the list. He has a growing vocabulary of sight words he can recognize fast. All of his miscues were visually similar and he read the list with speed.
Running Records: Text Reading
Score: TL 4, Stanine: 3
Student is asked to read leveled texts to determine their instructional text level. He read a text level #2 independently with 95% accuracy and withno SC ratio, and he read a text level #5 as frustrational with 80% accuracy and 1:3 SC ratio. His instructional level is #4 with 94% accuracy and SC ratio of 1:2.
Alex read at a text level 4 instructionally. He definitely reads for meaning and structure. His miscues mostly make sense and sound right, but do not always look right. He generally has a good self correct ratio. Alex mostly looks at the beginning parts of words and not all the way across.
Words Their Way Assessment
Letter-Name Alphabetic (Middle)
This assessment is a spelling test that can be analyzed to show which stage of spelling development a student has under control when writing.
Alex can identify and record most consonants and many vowel sounds. He has a pretty good grasp on digraphs. Medial vowel sounds are often difficult for him to record. This assessment showed him to be in the Letter-Name Alphabetic (middle) stage of spelling. He spelled 4/26 words completely correct, had 29/56 features correct, and didn’t get any inflectional endings.
Phonological Awareness Skills Test (PAST)
Score: 11/14 skills
The student was given a phonological awareness test that assesses his competence with the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words.
For the 14 skills typically mastered in 1st grade, Alex was able to master 11 of them. The skills he had difficulty with were: syllable deletion, phoneme deletion in first sound in consonant blend, and phoneme deletion of final sounds.
Record of Oral Language
Score: Level 1: 12/14, Level 2: 4/14, Level 3: 1/14; Total Score: 17/42
Student was read aloud some sentences and asked to repeat them.
Level 1 sentence’s were very comfortable for Alex to repeat. The only reason he didn’t get them all correct was because he broke 2 contractions into separate words. Level 2 sentences were more difficult for Alex; he tended to omit a lot of words when repeating. In Level 3 sentences, Alex tended to substitute words, but what he said still made sense and generally sounded right.
Writing Sample
Alex is an emergent beginning writer. He has a lot of early writing behaviors under control. He can write from left to right and he can form most letters legibly and has consistent spacing between words. He often writes several sentences about a topic or book he has read and writes from personal experiences. He can spell many high frequency words in every detail. He is beginning to use periods and some capitals correctly. He can spell many short CVC quickly and correctly. He is a very phonetic speller and doesn’t worry about orthography. He sometimes rereads what he is writing to see what he should write next. He often substitutes letters for those with similar pronunciation. He chooses letters on the basis of sounds instead of spelling patterns. He is beginning to revise a little.
Observation Summary
Useful Strategic Activity on Text
Alex seems to control his directionality and movement while reading continuous text. He reads for meaning and structure and he can control book language well. When he gets to a point of difficulty he rereads to search meaning and structure and he sometimes checks the first letter. His errors generally make sense and sound right. He self monitors to self correct with known words or initial visual information (sometimes). He also self monitors when his reading doesn’t sound right or make sense. He appears to possibly be cross checking meaning with visual information, although not all of the time.
Problem Strategic Activity on Text
Alex appears to self monitor with initial visual letters, although not consistently. He also neglects visual information such as inflectional endings. He miscues on simple known words because his lack of attention to the print. He can also get so slowed down with visual information he forgets to read for meaning.
Useful Strategic Activity with Words
Alex attends to the initial letters most of the time (in writing more than reading). He notices and attends to final letters more in writing too. He can write some words in every detail quickly. Alex can hear the words in sentences and attempts to write all unknown words with sound analysis. He appears to have a consonant framework for each word he writes. He can sometimes link to new words with analogy.
Problem Strategic Activity with Words
Alex doesn’t appear to recognize letter, word, and line rearrangement. He knows that words need vowels, but is still confused with some of their sounds to record them. He doesn’t appear to look across the word when reading text or words in isolation. He mainly just looks at the initial letter.
Useful Strategic Activity with Letters
Alex can form and identify most of his letters with ease. He can identify them by letter name. He attends to first letters in reading and writing. He can detect an error in reading with a mismatch letter (CC V with M to SC), but doesn’t do this consistently. He attempts to slowly articulate words to hear and record the sounds he heard. He can write other words with the same spelling patterns (analogy).
Problem Strategic Activity with Letters
Alex has a few letter confusions and he seems to have difficulty with vowel sounds. He needs work on some of his letter formations.
OS Summary
Alex has most of his early reading behaviors under control (front of book, print contains message, L-R, LP-RP, return sweep, first/last concept, 1:1 matching, letters/words). He can locate known and unknown words in text. He is reading instructionally on a level 4. He usually reads for meaning and structure, but neglects to use visual information consistently. He has a lot of SC that should be read right the first time (these words are HF words like: the, a, yes, can, and). At POD, he sometimes links to what he knows to solve (s-and/sand). Other times he waits for a told with no attempt at the word and he quickly loses meaning. Alex attempts all unknown words in writing. He does a quiet sound analysis of the words he needs to write. He writes his known words quickly and forms most of his letters legibly. He has early writing behaviors under control (L-R, return sweep, spacing). He seems to have a few letter confusions.
Recommendations
Reading: Alex needs to get more high frequency words in his vocabulary. He really needs his known words to be more quickly and fluently known so that he can recognize them the first time and not have to SC every time. His reading mostly makes sense and sounds right, but he often neglects visual information. He doesn’t closely attend to the text and that causes many miscues on words that are known (substitutions/insertions/SC). When he gets to a POD, he needs to be reminded what would make sense, sound right and look right (making sure that he still has meaning in the forefront and attending to visual information). He also needs to be looking beyond the first letter of the words, thinking about what he knows that could help him solve the word. Working with words with different inflectional endings would help Alex to start looking across the words.
Writing: Alex needs to get a larger core of writing words under his belt, so that he can have them to link to when writing new words. He would benefit from pattern instruction in spelling. He could also gain assistance in realizing how reading and writing are reciprocal and how to link them together whether reading or writing. This is so because he attempts all unknown words in writing, but is very hesitant to in reading. He could also benefit from blend instruction. Some letter formation work could help tease out some of his confusions.