Initial Assessment 1

Demographic & Background Information

Amanda is ten years old and is a very talkative fourth grader. Her fourth grade class is composed of twenty eight

students, with nine of these students having Individualized Education Plans. Amanda is the oldest of two siblings and has a

strong passion for soccer. She comes from a close-knit Caucasian family who loves engaging in physical activities together

(e.g. running, playing outside). Amanda has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and often has trouble focusing on

tasks. She also has a mild anxiety disorder that causes her to become anxious in certain situations. Although Amanda does

not receive any special services, she often works in a lower ability group that needs additional supports.

Reasons for Referral

Mrs. Johnson referred Amanda for tutoring because she is close to approaching grade level in reading and writing

but she needs more individualized instruction to help her reach this goal. Mrs. Johnson recognizes that Amanda has

effective decoding skills but is concerned about her difficulties with comprehension and inferential thinking. Additionally,

when reading, Amanda often rushes through the text and makes many avoidable mistakes. Also, when asked to compose

summary writing pieces, Amanda includes too many details and often omits words or leaves off endings. Mrs. Johnson

hopes, through this tutoring process, that Amanda’s comprehension and summary writing will improve.

Interview

While interviewing Amanda, she clearly illustrated her enthusiasm for reading and her understanding of the

importance of this lifelong skill (Appendix A). She said that it is important to learn how to read because: “When people go

to the store, they need to know what to buy. When they go buy toys, they need to know the name, the price, and the tax.”

She explained that she has three large shelves of books in her bedroom and she especially likes to read books from the

“Dork Diaries” series and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. She also explained her dislike for Disney books because “they

are too short and don’t tell us how the person feels.”

When asked about writing, Amanda was even more enthusiastic than she was about reading. She explained that

she loves writing on the weekends and often creates her own fairy tales. One of her favorite stories that she wrote was

called “Lizzie and the Three Bears.” If Amanda does not know how to spell a word when she is writing, she said that she

either looks the word up in the dictionary or breaks the word down into syllables. When asked to pretend that she was a

teacher, Amanda said she would let her students write about an animal of their choice for three hours a day. She explained:

“That will help them get better at writing.”

Initial Assessment 2

Authentic Assessment Techniques and Results

Running Records

To evaluate Amanda’s reading ability we selected a variety of non-fiction books from Fountas & Pinnell. Before

assessment, Mrs. Johnson recommended for us to use a non-fiction text at the mid- fourth grade level as a starting point for

Amanda. Therefore, we had Amanda read this book during our first assessment session. However, due to Amanda’s

trouble with comprehension, we thought it would be best to conduct more running records with lower fourth grade leveled

books. After conducting four running records with these different expository texts, we were able to determine that Not Too

Cold for a Polar Bear (Appendix B) was Amanda’s instructional level text. For this book, Amanda’s word recognition

accuracy, or the percentage of words she read correctly, was 95%. Amanda read 1 out of every 22 words incorrectly, giving

her an error ratio of 1:22. Additionally, Amanda was able to correct 1 out of every 5 of these errors, so her self-correction

ratio was 1:5. Although she had strong word recognition accuracy, Amanda’s self-correction ratio and comprehension

prevented her from being able to read this book at the independent level.

Amanda was able to comprehend the important facts that the book relayed about polar bears’ physical

characteristics. She stated that polar bears have guard hair, blubber, and black skin; however, she called the guard hair

“ground hair” and said that all of these features are part of polar bears’ “special skin.” She was not able to correctly explain

that these features are different layers of polar bears’ bodies. When we asked Amanda a Fountas and Pinnell “beyond the

text” question, “Why is it important for polar bears to live where they do?,” she was able to identify that polar bears’ bodies

are adapted to their climate but she also said that if polar bears lived in warmer climates they would be “freezing,”

demonstrating her difficulty with inferential thinking. Also, when prompted to tell us more about what she had learned from

the book, she correctly said that polar bears live all over the Arctic Region and near the North Pole, but she did not name

some of the other important facts from the text such as the type of food polar bears eat and their swimming abilities. It is

evident that Amanda can read the text but she has trouble summarizing important elements and drawing inferences from the

reading.

Writing Sample

During the interview, Amanda became very excited when we asked her to demonstrate her writing skills. She

explained to us that writing is a way for her to express her ideas and that it was one of her favorite things to do during

school.

Initial Assessment 3

When asked about what topic she wanted to write about, Amanda enthusiastically stated that she was going to tell

us about one of her favorite vacations. Therefore, when Amanda was creating her writing sample, we also composed pieces

about our favorite trips to make her feel more at ease. In her writing sample (Appendix C), we analyzed the positive and

negative aspects of Amanda’s writing at the message, sentence, and conventions of print levels (Appendix D). After

actively examining Amanda’s writing sample, we placed her in Gunning’s Stage 4: The Experimenting Writer of the

Developmental Stages of Writing and Level 4: The Capable Writer on the Six Traits Scoring Continuum.

Message Quality

At the message level, Amanda developed one central idea about her vacation. She titled her writing “My Trip to

Disney,” and created two paragraphs that contained supporting details for her two different topics. She also wrote two

descriptive paragraphs to express her thoughts and ideas. Throughout her writing, Amanda included “voice” when

explaining her favorite ride and when illustrating the emotions she felt during this trip.

Before beginning her writing sample, Amanda did not use any preplanning strategies. As a result of not

preplanning, she has also failed to create a third paragraph for her concluding statement. For example, in her second

paragraph, Amanda discussed her favorite ride and then ended her writing saying, “All of the rides were really fun and I

was happy that my brother had the best birthday ever!!!” Mrs. Johnson told us that her students were taught to create

introductory, body, and conclusion paragraphs in fourth grade.

Sentence Quality

At the sentence level, Amanda wrote simple and compound sentences that contained correct noun/verb agreement.

She also used the conjunction “and” in one of her compound sentences. In addition, Amanda incorporated basic descriptive

words into her writing. For example, she stated “all of the rides were really fun” and “people went on the big screen” to

support her ideas and thoughts about Disney World.

Amanda’s writing lacked the use of sequence and/or conjunction words (with the exception of the word “and”).

However, when Amanda did use the conjunction “and,” she created one long run-on sentence. She failed to establish two

separate sentences that explained details about her favorite ride. Also, within this run-on sentence, Amanda did not use the

correct case of a pronoun. For example, she wrote: “It was when Mike told jokes and people went on the big screen and me

and my sister got to tell a joke.” This sentence illustrated how Amanda’s writing could be improved with practice of proper

grammar.

Initial Assessment 4

Conventions of Print

Throughout Amanda’s writing sample, she demonstrated her knowledge of capitalization and punctuation by

beginning each sentence with a capital letter and ending each sentence with a period. Amanda also spelled most words

correctly, including more difficult words like “amusement.” Additionally, Amanda illustrated her understanding of proper

page organization by indenting both of her paragraphs. She also skipped lines when creating her writing sample, a useful

editing strategy. Amanda further demonstrated her editing skills when she reread her sample to edit her work. For example,

when explaining her favorite ride, Amanda originally stated “It was we Mike told jokes,” however, after rereading her work

she edited this mistake and changed the word “we” to “when.”

At the conventions of print level, Amanda made minor spelling and punctuation errors. Although Amanda did

spell most words correctly, she failed to include the letter “e” at the end of the word “favorite.” This omission may suggest

that Amanda has difficulty spelling words that contain silent letters. Also, Amanda failed to include an apostrophe “s” in

the word “brother’s,” instead she wrote: “In October I went to Disney World for my brothers birthday.” This example

demonstrates that Amanda needs additional instruction on the difference between plural and possessive nouns.

Furthermore, within her writing sample, Amanda did not include a comma where it was necessary and adds a comma where

it was not appropriate. For example, she inserted a comma after the word “like” and wrote: “We went to all of the

amusement parks like, Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Epcot and many more.” This information shows that Amanda’s

writing could be improved with more practice with punctuation.

Objective for Reading

Beginning: Amanda identifies some important facts of non-fiction texts but does not provide a complete summary of the

material. She also tends to recite wordy answers that contain incorrect components of information.

Behavior: Amanda will use a graphic organizer (Appendix E) as a comprehension strategy to produce a summary of non-

fiction texts while reading both independent and instructional leveled books. For expository reading, she will ask herself:

“What is the main idea of the text?”, “What are three important facts?”, and “What is one specific example?”

Context: During our tutoring sessions, we will complete this objective through the use of direct instruction while Amanda

reads expository texts.

Initial Assessment 5

End: Amanda will improve her comprehension and will be able to use the strategy independently to summarize the text.

She will ask herself: “What is the main idea of the text?”, “What are three important facts?”, and “What is one specific

example?”

Tutoring Program for Reading

To fulfill the reading objective, Amanda will read expository texts aloud at the instructional and independent

levels. We will help Amanda remain actively involved in our tutoring sessions by allowing her to choose texts from the

selection of books that we have provided. We know that Amanda loves physical activities and animals so we will appeal to

these interests when choosing books for her. We will introduce the comprehension graphic organizer by explaining how,

why, and when to use this strategy. We will use the Think Aloud approach to model how to use the graphic organizer to

summarize the text. This approach will allow us to demonstrate how to determine the main idea, important facts, and one

example from the reading. We will then help Amanda reach this objective by providing her with the graphic organizer.

Amanda will use this visual to monitor her comprehension while reading the text. We will continue to model and explain

this strategy throughout all of our tutoring sessions. We will use both positive and constructive feedback to help Amanda

improve her summarization abilities. At the beginning of each tutoring session, we will first start with direct instruction and

then guide Amanda toward a more autonomous approach.

Tutoring Program for Writing

By having Amanda use a graphic organizer during each tutoring session, we have incorporated writing into our

reading objective. Amanda will use the information from the graphic organizer to write comprehensible and concise

summary pieces. Throughout the writing program, we will again explain how, why, and when this strategy can be used for

writing. We will actively participate during our writing instruction by composing and sharing our own work. We will model

and Think Aloud how to use the main idea, important facts and one example from the graphic organizer to compose

summary pieces. To enhance Amanda’s confidence, we will share our personal struggles with writing. We will also

regularly encourage her to speak about her challenges with writing and with using the graphic organizer strategy.

Throughout the semester, we will frequently analyze Amanda’s writing samples and we will draw conclusions from our

data to adjust our instruction accordingly.

Initial Assessment 6

Appendix A- InterviewStudent: Amanda School: Noxon Road ElementaryTutors: Jessica Argese and Lauren Mazzotta Grade: __4__ Age: __10__

1. What are your favorite books?I love to read the “Dork Diaries” and the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”.

2. Do you like to read?I do like to read. I read before I go to bed.

3. Why do you need to learn to read?When people go to the store, they need to know what to buy. When they go buy toys, they need to know the name, the price, and the tax.

4. What kinds of writing do you do?In school, I am doing butterfly research and am making an owl book. At home, I like to write fairy tales. I named one “Lizzie and the Three Bears”.

5. Pretend you are a teacher, how would you make writing more fun and meaningful for your students?I would let my students pick what type of animal they would want to write about. I would bring in books and laptops and let them do it for 3 hours a day. That will help them get better at writing.

6. What do you do when you do not know how to spell a word?Mrs. Johnson tells us to go into the dictionary and look it up, but I usually just sound it out. My old teacher taught me to break the word down into syllables like “Phil-a-del-phi-a”.

7. Do you have your own books that you can read at home?I have 3 shelves in my room and some in my sister’s room. I don’t really like hers though because she has Disney books. Disney books are too short and don’t tell us how the person feels.

8. When do you write at home?

Initial Assessment 7

I usually write on the weekends, but sometimes I will after school if I have time. I take my laptop out and just write.

Appendix B- Running Record

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Initial Assessment 9

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Appendix C- Writing Sample

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Appendix D- Writing Assessment Sheet

Marist CollegeEDUC 352 Assessment and Remediation of Reading and Writing

WORKSHEET FOR WRITING ASSESSMENT

Child’s name _______Amanda_____________

Title of writing sample ____”My Trip to Disney”_________

Date sample was completed ____February 12, 2013____

Genre represented _______Personal Narrative_________

Message level (the entire discourse)

Positive aspect(s) reflected in writing Wrote about one central idea Wrote own ideas and experiences Wrote two paragraphs that contained two topics Writing included voice Writing contained descriptive paragraphs Gave writing piece a title

Missing aspect(s) of writing Did not preplan writing Did not create a third separate paragraph for concluding statement (something she was taught to

do in fourth grade)

Sentence level (the grammar)

Positive aspect(s) reflected in writing Wrote simple and compound sentences- sentences contained correct noun/verb agreement Used the conjunction “and” Used basic descriptive words

Missing aspect(s) of writing Did not use sequential words Mostly did not use conjunction words (with the exception of “and”) Incorrect order of pronouns (e.g. “me and my sister”) Second paragraph contains a run on sentence (inappropriate use of “and”)

Conventions of Print (spelling, punctuation, letter formation, page organization, and so forth)

Initial Assessment 12

Positive aspect(s) reflected in writing Mostly knew correct spelling Used correct capitalization Mostly used correct punctuation Knew page organization- created two indented paragraphs Read to edit work

Missing aspect(s) of writing Did not include the ending of the word “favorite”- missed the silent “e” Omitted one comma and incorrectly used one comma in the introductory paragraph Did not include an apostrophe when attempting to write the word “brother’s”

Initial Assessment 13