Assessment+Portfolio

Jane Doe is a fourth grader at Millstone River Elementary School in the West Windsor – Plainsboro school district. She lives at home with her father, mother, two uncles and two sisters. She is the middle child and shares her room with her two sisters. For a living, her father “cooks” and her mother “cleans.” Jane’s mother picks her up from home when the bus drops her off and takes her to work with her. Mostly while at her mother’s work she says she “plays with puppies.” Since Jane goes to work with her mother, she says that she usually does not get back home until ten in the evening. At that point she reads in bed until she falls asleep. At home she still has chores to complete as well; she must fold clothes, clean her room, wash dishes and straighten up the backyard. Because of all the things Jane has going on during the week, she does not get much time to watch television. There is not one in her bedroom so she only gets a chance to watch it if she gets home earlier than ten at night. This sometimes happens when her dad picks her up and her homework is already completed. Her favorite channel is Cartoon Network when she does get the chance to watch television. Sometimes on the weekends she plays video games with her cousins, mostly “Black Ops.”

Jane does have a bedtime of nine on school nights and “church school nights,” but most of the time she is not home at that time to go to bed. Jane also gets an allowance from her parents, usually it is five dollars but sometimes she gets extra and gets twenty dollars. She does not belong to any clubs outside of school (not counting Church School as a club) but she does have a family night where all her cousins come and they play board games. Jane was very excited to share this part of her home life, she also shared that at these times she taught her younger cousins to read. It is apparent already through observation and some conversation that Jane loves to read. I also found out that although she loves to read she does not have a home library and depends on visits to the school library and her neighbors for books. Her favorite books are “Bad Kitty.”

Since finding out that Jane loves to read, I questioned her further about her school environment. Jane likes school and her favorite subject is anything that allows her to read, but she hates Spanish class. When at home, Jane does her homework in either her mom’s room, her room, or her secret hideout. If she needs help with her homework her father assists her or her older sister who is eleven. She believes the amount of homework she gets from school is medium, “not too much to handle but not too little” either. When Jane was asked if she was a good reader or a not so good reader, she answered medium. She believes she is a good reader because she has expression when reading and she can really imagine how the characters are feeling. On the other hand, Jane feels she is also a not so good reader because she has trouble with some words. Because Jane has trouble with some words while reading she expressed that to become a better reader one needs to “stretch out words and practice reading everyday.” When teaching someone to read like she does to her cousins, she believes you need to focus on the meaning of the word. Jane thinks it is important to know how to read because in the future it will help you “know language.” When asked what her favorite genre was she said fairytales but only after many scaffolding questions. She needed a few examples of genres before she could chose which one she liked. It is possible that she only chose this because she knew the word. It was familiar because it was just taught in a lesson the previous week. In observations you can see Jane reading realistic fiction 95% of the time. It would be interesting to expose her more and have more access to fairy tales, and see if she picks them up to read more.

On November 3, 2011 Jane was given an Informal Reading Conference with the book //Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules//. Jane chose this book because her sister got her into the series. It reminds her of her own family and that it is important to be nice. She really enjoys it so far. Jane expressed that this is a just-right book for her and she thinks this because she knows what the words mean. In this assessment the student’s fluency, comprehension and miscues were being looked at. For a retelling of the story so far, Jane gives a short one sentence overview, “Three brothers are not getting along and the mom tries to solve the problem.” She needs to be assisted to elicit more information about the books she is reading. Throughout the conversation in the conference, you can elicit information that shows comprehension by asking specific questions that can help your assessment (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 493). However, students should be able to elicit these answers on their own and may need instruction on how to summarize using important story parts, including setting, characters, problem, etc.

In terms of Jane’s, she used the graphically similar text-processing tool. Jane had a few miscues and they all followed the same pattern. They were visually and phonetically close to the accurate word but they were not the word (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 489). This shows that Jane is having trouble with the Phonology cueing system where she is unable to distinguish phonemes, which develops difficulties with comprehension. For example, Jane had trouble with //scratch// and said //sketch//. She did not stop for most of the words she miscued and just continued reading on. This signals either Jane understood what the sentence was suppose to mean based on the rest of the sentence, or she just disregarded the sentence because she did not understand it and kept reading. This is a product of her semantic system, however whether the miscue was acceptable or not Jane continued reading. It is possible that Jane does not yet have to tools to figure out the words and needs future instruction on them. Using the information on Jane’s short retelling of the stories for comprehension checks, it is possible that Jane is not understanding the story because she can only give short one or two sentence answers to what she just read. She is missing several keys points, like characters, plot, setting, etc.

In terms of Fluency, according to the NAEP’s Integrated Reading Performance Record Oral Reading Scale, Jane is at a level four. She reads primarily in large meaningful phrases, not in three or four word groups. She does have some miscues and regressions but it does not take away from the overall structure of the story (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 491). Like Jane expressed in her Interest Interview, she did read with expression, also a signal that she is at a level four. Even though her fluency seems to be on a level four, Jane can not recall the details of what she is reading. Fluency is important because students do not become enthusiastic readers until they have reached fluency. To them it is too much work until they have reached a high fluency level. To reach fluency students need to read as often as they can and avoid books that are too easy. Once fluency is acquired, teachers need to assess whether it is sight words or the student understands the meaning of each word (Duffy, p. 33). If Jane is reading sight words then she is lacking in comprehension and will not understand the story. At this point, fluency paired with Jane’s comprehension assessments, her fluency is most likely attributed to sight words more than meaning.

Through a Directed Reading Assessment given on November 15th and completed on November 17th, it found that Jane’s independent reading level is on a 3rd grade level. She was able to answer six out of the eight questions. The questions she missed where character characterization/inferential and setting. This put her at an adequate level. For her running record, Jane only made two miscues, which put her at an adequate level. She miscued by omitting a word, but it did not affect the meaning of the sentence so she kept reading. Her semantic cueing system found the sentence still acceptable because it made sense. She also added the word //back// into a sentence. The sentence read, “Come in back and make yourself warm,” which still made sense to Jane and is semantically acceptable so she also kept reading. Although this is her independent level despite the amount of errors putting her at adequate, it was clear through out the conversation with Jane that she had an understanding and could handle this level on her on. In addition because Jane only missed two questions, the directions instruct you to move on to the next level to evaluate. Of the two miscues that were made, Jane kept reading without correcting, this would prompt a mini lesson for such issues that hopefully would quickly correct the problem found on this level.

Jane’s instructional level is at grade level four. Some types of questions she was able to answer in her own were: characterization, problem resolution, and story problem. All of these questions were literal questions. The two types of questions that were answered with assistance were setting, and characterization (evaluative). Because they had to be pulled out of Jane through scaffolding by posing questions that would lead Jane to answers this would be a perfect level to instruct. Jane needs modeling on how to do this thinking on her own. Her running record however was still easy. She stuttered once by made no large miscues. She had great fluency and showed expression in her voice when reading the dialogue. Because Jane is in fourth grade right now, she will be learning the tools she needs this year to stay on track with comprehension.

Jane’s frustration level is at grade level five because she was unable to answer many of the questions without the assistance of the text. This shows that she had no comprehension or retention of the story. Even with the assistance of the text in front of her Jane still required scaffolding questions from the teacher in order to reach the answers. She could pull very little information from the text. Jane also had too many miscues through out her running record to allow her to move on. Jane is still had trouble with Phonology throughout her reading aloud. She is having difficulties with phonemes still such as //indentify// becoming //indefinitely// and //entire// becoming //entry//. Jane did not stop for most of these miscues showing a failing semantics system because the sentence did not make sense but she kept reading. However through one section of her miscue, she understood that something did not make sense using meaning or semantics for clues, but she repeated it wrong unable to correct the miscue and kept reading (indentify/indefinitely).

In the beginning of the year Jane was asked to write a piece of work about anything she wanted to. Jane chose to write about a family experience, which she already stated was her favorite. She wrote about the time her mother lost a baby. In terms of content, there are a few misspelled words, including thoght (thought), were (where), wated (waited), whent (went), and babby (baby). Many of these words are spelt by the way they sound. Jane used the phonemic strategy to solve how to spell these words by thinking about the sounds (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 370). Phonemic strategies are one of the first that student learn. Jane has yet to recognize that this strategy can only help you so much and that the one to one correspondence does not exist for all words. Efficient readers and writers need to use a combination of word solving strategies to be the most efficient. (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 371). Organizationally, Jane has trouble separating her thoughts; her writing consists of one large paragraph that continues until the end. She has no indenting, not even in the first sentence of her large paragraph. It was indicated by the teacher that after this first draft many students had trouble separating events and thoughts with paragraphs and indenting those paragraphs and their dialogue. A strength of this piece of writing was she kept to one story line and it was sequential. In terms of her mechanics, Jane’s sentence structure is almost the same through her piece of writing. She uses a lot of “then’s” to show the progression of the events in the story. In addition there is some dialogue but there are no quotations around the scarce dialogue. Jane also does not use commas where she should create a pause in her sentences. Because Jane is not aware of the quotations, the correct capitalization that accompanies it is not correct which is only an expected effect. Other than that, it is clear that Jane grasped the concept of when to correctly capitalize her words. Soon after the first writing sample was taken, a mini lesson was conducted for each of these weaknesses.

In the next writing sample, Jane shows improvement in using more than one word solving strategy. She shows the use of the strategy of making connections. Jane used what she knows about a word to figure out the new word. She pairs this with the phonemic strategy when she hears a familiar sound and connects it with the spelling of other words (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 371). Overall her organization is still one whole paragraph with no indenting. However Jane started to incorporate the use of quotations with her dialogue into her work. In Jane’s final piece of writing, we clearly see a change in her writing at first glance. It seems she has incorporated paragraphs in her writing to clearly separate and organize her events, although she does not indent the paragraphs. However when you read over the piece of writing you see that she has just separated her sentences into paragraphs. We know now, she understands the concept of paragraphs a little, but she still needs further instruction. Jane also incorporated the use of quotations around her dialogue more; although some times she forgets the end quotation she uses them more regularly and is aware they need to be present. The flow of the story is progressive. She has a clear problem that arises and she has rising action before the resolution of the story. It is also apparent that Jane is trying to incorporate her word of the day “elated,” and she does so successfully. Many of her sentences start with “I” and then a verb, but she does start one or two sentences a differently.

Based on Jane’s teacher’s spelling assessment in the beginning of the year, using the Ganske method it appears that Jane is in the Within-Word Stage. This is the third stage and is characterized by having greater experience with print. This experience leads to more awareness and in turn moves to more conventional spelling. They move beyond the strict one letter and one sound correspondence and learn to spell by pattern. (Ganske, pg. 331).

After these informal assessments, I feel Jane’s strengths as a reader, are first and foremost her love to read. I also think that Jane’s fluency is really helpful for her, it makes having comprehension more likely if her sentences are not broken up into three to four word blocks. A combination of Jane’s love to read and her high fluency allows Jane to read with expression, which I also find a strength of hers. Some of Jane’s weaknesses are her comprehension. If Jane comes to a word she does not know, she does not use context clues or any other cueing system to help her solve the word. This stops Jane from comprehending, and it changes the story for her. Comprehending is reading for meaning, and with Jane omitting sections of the story because she does not know some words or understand them defeats the purpose and those texts are too hard for her (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 302). It is recommended that teachers use the monitoring and correcting strategy to check and regulate performance. It allows teachers to notice what Jane does not understand, help her search for useful information that will increase understanding and remind her to use multiple sources to check and correct reading (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 312). Also recommended is working on summarizing with Jane. Teachers can help her learn how to relate important ideas, events and details to comprehend the whole text (Fountas and Pinnell, p. 313).

As a writer Jane’s strengths are being able to write in a sequential fashion. She follows a clear path and her information does not jump back and forth. She, from the beginning, has used dialogue and has since started to learn how to properly punctuate it. A great strength of Jane’s that should not be over looked is her ability to absorb the writing mini lessons her teacher is giving and her word of the day vocabulary, then applying it to her future writing. Another strength that helps Jane is her love to read and the exposure to vocabulary and types of writing. To further develop her skills, I think more mini lessons focusing on problems with her writing should continue. I think another lesson on indenting and paragraphing would greatly benefit Jane. Depending on the status of the class depends whether this should be small group instruction or another whole class lesson. A mini lesson on sentence structure would help Jane to vary her sentences and make them less redundant. In addition to that, a lesson on exploding the moment would help Jane add details to her story. In return this might help her naturally vary her sentence structure.

Overall, with each assessment Jane is on track for her fourth grade class. There is still plenty of time left in the year in which Jane has a chance to learn and grow as a student. With these assessments her teacher can help tailor the instruction so it is more successful for her and possibly other students as well.

Works Cited Duffy, Gerald G. //Explaining Reading//. New York: The Guilford Press, n.d. Print.

Fountas, Irene C, and Gay Su Pinnell. //Guiding Readers and Writers//. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001. Print.

Ganske, Kathy. //Word Journeys//. New York: The Guilford Press, 2000. //Google Books//. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.