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Maggie Gleason

CI 5413/5414
May 8th, 2015
Case Study Report
Student Name: Sofia
Grade: 3
Preservice Teacher: Ms. Gleason
Background Information
Sofia is currently a third grade student at Creek Valley Elementary. She
is confident in her reading abilities and enjoys reading. Sofia has expressed
that she values reading and so does her family, whom she often reads with
at home. She enjoys discussing books she is currently reading or has read
before. Her favorite genre of books is mysteries and she has read several
different series. While Sofia can be shy and slow to open up at first, she likes
to talk about her family dog, her friends, and what she does on the
weekends. I have worked with Sofia individually over the course of 10 weeks,
with one one-hour session per week. We have focused on word work
activities for harder suffixes, writing with correct punctuation, reading Frindle
and Spotlight Club Mysteries, and conducted several assessments related to
literacy development. I believe Sofia is currently in the upper transitional
stage moving into the intermediate developmental stage of literacy learning.
Assessments
#1Motivation to Read Profile
The Motivation to Read Profile is composed of two parts, the reading
survey and the conversational interview. The questions on both assessments
relate to the students self-concept as a reader and how they value reading.
The purpose of the profile is to reveal students attitudes, interests, and

background related to reading, which all relate to motivation and help to


guide motivational strategies. Her score for the reading survey was 32/40 for
self-concept and 38/40 for value.
Overall, Sofia highly values reading inside and outside of school. She
also has a positive self-concept as a reader and feels confident in her
abilities. As Sofia indicated in the interview, one aspect of reading and
writing that she would like to strengthen is her vocabulary knowledge, which
she also thinks is the hardest part about reading. Additionally, a challenge
may be to expand the genres she reads considering she indicated a strong
interest and background in reading mystery books.
Based on results, working on helping Sofia with strategies to
understand unfamiliar vocabulary words she comes across in reading will
help to boost her self-concept and reading comprehension. I think it would be
beneficial for Sofia to set goals with her reading so she self-monitors her
development, and also use challenge as a construct of motivation to help her
continue to improve.
#2Elementary Spelling Inventory
The Qualitative Spelling Inventories are lists of spelling words for
students that increase in difficulty as you go down the list. The Elementary
Spelling Inventory includes words with different features ranging from the
emergent, letter name-alphabetic, within word pattern, syllables and affixes,
and derivational relations developmental spelling stages. The informal
writing sample supports this assessment.

The results of the assessment show that Sofias instructional level is


harder suffixes, where her feature score was 1/5 and is within the late
syllables and affixes to early derivational relations stage. She is also at the
instructional level for bases or roots with a feature score of 0/5, in the middle
derivational relations stage.
Sofias strengths include all features at or below the middle syllables
and affixes stage of spelling development. Her informal writing sample
showed congruencies with the correct features of the spelling stages as with
her scores on the QSI. Sofias strengths also include writing independently
while developing her ideas to produce a cohesive story with some
expression. Her challenges include spelling with harder suffixes and bases or
roots as well as working on planning out her writing and revising.
Based on the results of this assessment, future instruction could
include doing word sorts with harder suffixes. Also, beginning to work on
some common bases and roots from unfamiliar vocabulary words within
books and asking whether she can try to infer a meaning from the context
will help with decoding strategies. In future writing instruction,
recommendations could include working through strategies for planning
writing and revising.
#3Running Record
The running record assessment consists of listening to a student read
part of a text and recording their correct words, substitutions, omissions,
insertions, repetitions, self-corrections, and teacher interventions. This
assessment allows teachers to analyze a students reading performance so

that appropriate texts can be chosen at their independent and instructional


levels. It also reveals their patterns of reading behaviors and their use of
cueing systems. We used the book Frindle by Andrew Clements, which is at
guided reading level R. Sofias accuracy with this text was 95.1% so this text
is at the higher edge of her independent level, close to the instructional
level. Her error rate was 1:20.5 and her self-correction rate was 1:1.17.
Her strengths include monitoring her reading by repeating phrases that
did not make sense. Most often she uses visual cueing of looking at the letter
patterns to decode. Her errors included two insertions, three omissions, and
one substitution (i.e. treckeded for tracked). Although the running record
does not directly record it, I noticed that she often reads without pausing at
the end of sentences or changing inflection, and she also pauses in unnatural
places in the text, which affect her fluency and expression.
Texts at Sofias independent level are those below guided reading level
R, while those at her instructional level are likely between levels R-T. I think
that one of the things to work on with Sofia could be fluency and expression,
since she reads with unnatural pausing and this correlates with her writing. A
strategy could be utilizing partner reading to model appropriate pacing and
phrasing while having her follow along with her finger.
#4Oral Retelling
The Oral Retelling Assessment consists of the student reading a
passage out loud at their independent reading level and retelling what they
remember. This assessment provides information about the students
comprehension skills. Results are evaluated based on inclusion of basic story

elements such as the setting, characters, goal, problem, and solution/ending.


Sofia read the passage and retold with confidence and little prompting. For
both the 3rd and 4th grade passages Sofia included each of the 6 story
elements. She clearly retold the story in sequential order and included
details from the text. Sofia did not fully include the ending from the 3rd grade
passage at first, but after a prompt she explained it correctly.
This assessment shows that Sofias has strong comprehension the
basic story elements of a text at her independent level. She is able to include
details about the text in an order that flows and makes sense. This
assessment doesnt show specific challenges, but a challenge may be
extending this comprehension to more challenging texts and expanding to
texts other than narratives.
Recommendations for future instruction could be to work on
comprehension with more challenging texts at her instructional level through
asking questions at different levels of comprehension (literal, inferential, and
critical) throughout reading. Also a strategy could include helping her to
activate her prior knowledge related to the context for understanding words
that are unfamiliar. Additionally, engaging in making meaningful connections
to the text and directing conversations before, during, and after reading is
important.
#5Formal Writing Sample
The Formal Writing sample is where students prewrite/brainstorm and
then write for around ten minutes to produce a writing sample. The writing
sample is assessed based on the 6+1 Trait Condensed Scoring guide, which

has features for ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency,
and conventions within three different levels of mastery (1, 3, 5). For the
majority of features within the categories Sofia scored a 3. For
conventions, some features are in the 1 category due to missing
punctuation and paragraphing. This related to a feature in the sentence
fluency because it caused sentences to be rambling or awkward and
phrasing was not natural (1). In the ideas category she scored a few
features within the 5 category because the topic was narrow and she
included reasonably accurate details.
This assessment shows that one of Sofias strengths in writing is her
ideas. She is able to choose a focus and include details with a prompt. She
also had varying sentence structures and has some individual perspective
present within the narrative. One of her challenges is conventions, because
there was a lot of punctuation missing that affected the sentence fluency.
She had a lot of run-on sentences and did not include any commas. She also
missed a lot of prepositions. However, she did spell most words correctly.
Based on these results recommendations could include focusing on
conventions, especially punctuation, in future lessons. I think looking at
comma and period usage during reading could be helpful for learning how
and why punctuation is used in context. Another option could be practicing
editing her own writing together to have her identify her own usage errors.
Writers workshop practice with pieces for different purposes, audiences, and
lengths will help to continue to improve and refine all writing features.

Summary and Recommendations


Based on my work with Sofia, I know that she is a highly motivated
reader who reads frequently for academic purposes as well as enjoyment.
She reads grade level texts with strong comprehension. She is able to
interact with a text through answering questions before, during, and after
reading. In future work, possible recommendations for instructional focuses
could include fluency and vocabulary development, as well as refining
writing skills.
One of the main goal areas to work on with Sofia is fluency. While she
can read with pretty good accuracy and at an appropriate rate, her
expression needs improvement. She often reads over the punctuation, which
causes unnatural pausing patterns. Her expression may be affected by a
need for applying decoding strategies to unfamiliar vocabulary and
knowledge of punctuation usage. Fluency can be improved through
modeling, readers theater workshops, and repeat reading. Incorporating a
wide variety of genres of texts as well as texts at her independent and
instructional reading level will help to improve this.
While Sofia has strong comprehension skills overall, she often struggles
to figure out meaning from vocabulary within the text, or to use more
detailed vocabulary within her speaking and writing. Exposure to and study
of vocabulary within reading will greatly increase her vocabulary knowledge
and allow her to transfer them to other literacy aspects. This can be done

through work with synonyms and antonyms and picking out difficult
vocabulary from texts to study more in depth. Vocabulary knowledge can
also be increased as she moves through the late syllables and affixes stage
by looking at harder suffixes and common roots and making word trees.
As far as writing, future instruction might include a focus on the editing
aspect of the writing process as well as developing a personal voice and
including more colorful vocabulary. Through the combination of assessment
results, I know that punctuation can be a challenge for Sofia. Just as she
often reads over it in text, she often skips over it or uses it incorrectly within
her writing. Using mentor texts and modeling editing for punctuation will
help to improve this skill. Studying the craft of the authors voice and how to
include that in your own writing could be helpful. Also, as her fluency with
reading increases it will help to improve her writing. Working with vocabulary
development throughout the three literacy aspects, especially working with
synonyms will help to improve her word choice in writing.
Overall, Sofia is a strong and hard working literacy student. I suggest
bringing in her interests such as her family and friends to have her open up
and engage her. From observations I know she enjoys reading out loud and
progressing her vocabulary knowledge. For writing, she can produce lengthy
independent pieces and is working on focusing on using all aspects of the
writing process to improve her writing. She is performing at grade level
within each of the five literacy essentials and will continue to make progress
through the use of assessment-based instruction.

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