Running Record Assessment

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.