The student, an above average reader at this early
point of his second grade year, was able to read this text passage fairly
fluently. His accuracy rate of this
grade-level text was 94% with an error rate of 1:17. The majority of his errors and
self-corrections were made as a result of visual cueing. There were no words on this page which caused
the reader to pause. Instead, his
reading ability, confidence, and desire to read quickly were evident when he
made such avoidable errors. For example,
he spoke the wrong tense on two words (one was self-corrected), said “that’s”
in place of “that”, and “everyone” instead of “everybody”. Three times, the
student inserted a short word (two prepositions and one determiner). One of those insertions was likely due to his
eyes seeing the word in the same position of the next line.
To assess his comprehension, I asked him to retell
what was taking place in these several paragraphs. While there was no main idea, he was able
place this content of this page in context with the rest of the story and
retell the main details in the proper sequence.
He summarized the setting, the characters and their emotions and
behaviors. He even connected their
actions with a recent incident that took place in classroom. He concluded his summary by telling what
happens next in the story. While he didn’t
recount all the details on the page, his retelling was comprehensive and his
comprehension is excellent.
To help the student develop better fluency, I would
encourage the student to slow down in his reading and challenge him further
with a higher level of text. He was
actually curious on the errors he made and felt he should have been more
perfect than he was. Using his feedback
and self-motivation, I would challenge him with a chart to track his own
progress on accurate reading. I would
assign him another similarly-complex text passage and do another running record
to attain an accuracy rate and set a benchmark.
We would repeat such running records with different levels (higher and
lower) texts once a week and track his performance. Assessment of his performance will be
measured by improvement in his accuracy rates over time. With his own desire to do better, I am
confident he will be motivated to do well in this brief weekly exercise which
can be done in 5 minutes. This will help
him slow down and increase the emphasis on accurate reading.
Reflection:
The running record assessment with miscue analysis
and story retelling is a highly useful tool that gives objective evidence in a
student’s reading ability and comprehension.
While the process is tedious and confusing at first, I can see how an
educator becomes more familiar and comfortable with more frequent
application.
I did a running record assessment with two students
who were both quite receptive and comfortable with the process. It was challenging however to keep a running
record as the children read at their normal pace. Still a novice, I had to refer to an onscreen
example showing the correct marks and symbols on a running record. I was glad though that I did not have to ask
either reader to slow down but I did carefully double check my notations by slowly
replaying the student’s reading in my mind as my eyes (and pencil) went through
my paper copy. I’m not sure of the
necessity to put a check on every correctly spoken word when we are listening
for errors and self-corrections. That
seems to take up time unnecessarily and uses up the precious little space
between lines.
An additional challenge was identifying the causes of
the errors. I had to refer to notes and
definitions of the cueing systems to complete the running record properly. Otherwise, the rest of the process including
the calculations and story retell was pretty intuitive.
The two students I evaluated were both good readers
who exhibited high accuracy rates and comprehension for the text they
read. I think my running record practice
would have been more enriching if the selected text was more complex and/or the
students were not as proficient.
Overall, the assessment was a valuable exercise that I am glad to have
been exposed to since I know I will have to utilize in the classroom in the
future.
