Andrea Nadeau

READ 366
11/7/18

Literacy Assessment Results, Reflection, and Summary

Overview of Student

For privacy purposes, I am using the pseudonym Alexia for this summary. Alexia is in
Kindergarten and has a little bit of a challenge with literacy. With speech, pronunciations,
and verbal knowledge she excels. During our assessments, Alexia used her letter sounds
to get through almost all parts of each assessment, which was beneficial in some areas,
and then not so much in others. Alexis does have some trouble with her self-confidence,
and had a tendency to ask me if what she was doing was correct, or if she was doing it
correctly. I would respond with telling her to do the best she could and whatever thought
she was correct. Overall, with some errors, she did pretty well with these assessments and
asked at the end of them if she could do more.
 Andrea Nadeau
READ 366
11/7/18

Assessment 1- Spelling Inventory

“Spelling inventories are quick and easy to administer and score, and they are reliable
and valid measures of what students know about words” (Bear et all, p. 26). From prior
observation, I knew that Alexia was going to struggle with the spelling inventory because
she has a hard time with differentiation between vowel sounds in words. Therefore, I was
anxious to see if she would be resistant in this assessment or lose self-confidence enough
to not want to finish, but she persisted. However, challenges I faced during this
assessment included not helping her when she asked for help or wanted to see how the
word was actually spelt. Since I had never given an assessment like this before, I also
struggled with not correcting her when she was sounding something out wrong, or
struggling with certain sounds. This assessment seemed a bit challenging for the both of
us, myself as a learning future teacher and herself as a student. Something that Alexia
succeeded with independently was sounding out words. This helped her begin and end a
lot of the words with the correct consonants because she recognized the specific letter
sounds. Unfortunately when it came to the vowel sounds, she struggled with
differentiating A, E, and I and then O and U. From this inventory I found that Alexia is at
the level of early letter name-alphabetic. According to table 2-3-Spelling Stage
Expectations by Grade Levels (Bear et al, p. 44), she is at the typical spelling stage range
for the beginning of Kindergarten. After reviewing the spelling inventory and her results,
I established that Alexia has not completely fulfilled these standards, but are working
towards standards:

K.4 The student will identify, say, segment, and blend various units of speech sounds.

a) Begin to discriminate between spoken sentences, words, and syllables.

c) Blend and segment multisyllabic words at the syllable level.

d) Segment one-syllable words into speech sound units including beginning

phoneme(s) (onset) and ending (rimes).

K.11 The student will print in manuscript.

a) Print uppercase and lowercase letters of the alphabet independently.

Going forward, I believe that the part of words that we need to focus on most with Alexia
is the middle and ending sounds, especially when it comes to vowels. Since she can
visually differentiate the vowels, we need to work on differentiating the sounds of vowels
the most.
Andrea Nadeau
READ 366
11/7/18
 Andrea Nadeau
READ 366
11/7/18

Assessment 2- Running Record

The purpose of running records is to “monitor their ability to recognize high-frequency

words, decode unfamiliar words, and use reading strategies” (Tompkins, p. 70). I was
fairly comfortable with doing the running record with Alexia. I had observed her reading
beforehand and noticed that she is currently an emergent reader. If she was not
pretending to tell the story, she was having someone else read the story to her and
constantly saying she can’t or couldn’t read it. However, if I assisted her, she was able to
go through the story with me. With these observations in mind, I chose to go with level A
for the running record, thinking that there was a possibility of struggle, but highly
unlikely. Within the results, I found that she did not have much trouble at all. The word
“colors” was the only one that she had trouble with, but after sounding it out and with
little teacher assistance, she was able to read it on her own. Throughout the story, I
observed that she has a fluency level of 2, where she has moderately slow reading in two
or three word phrases and some expression. Something that supported her fluency was
her reliance on her visual cues. She would use the pictures and recognition of familiar
words to read the book. I was sure of this when we go to page three, and she said, “I see a
red LADYbug”. The picture on the page was a ladybug, she was correct, but the sentence
only read, “I see a bug”. After finishing up the story, I went through the comprehension
and retelling parts of the assessment and she excelled. With no trouble or frustrations, she
was able to retell the story, tell the most important parts and others, as well as
comprehend and put the story into personal thinking. This resulted in her being in the
independent level of reading with a 97% accuracy rate, a comprehension score of 8, and a
fluency rating of 2. For a student in Kindergarten, this is an average reading level for
level A. In result of this running record, I believe she understands the following
standards:

K.5 The student will understand how print is organized and read.

d) Follow words from left to right and from top to bottom on a printed page.

K.9 The student will demonstrate comprehension of fictional texts.

b) Relate previous experiences to what is read.

d) Begin to ask and answer questions about what is read.

e) Use story language in discussions and retellings.

g) Discuss characters, setting, and events.

To further enhance her reading skill and increase her reading level, I think that we should
go to the next level of running record texts and go from there. Giving her more
challenging readings to work on will improve her reading, and we shall help her when
necessary.
Andrea Nadeau
READ 366
11/7/18
Andrea Nadeau
READ 366
11/7/18
 Andrea Nadeau
READ 366
11/7/18

Assessment 3- Choice: Find the Rhyme

The purpose of this assessment was to work on the middle and ending sounds of these
words. Due to the results of the spelling inventory that Alexia took first, we wanted to use
an assessment that revolved around letter sounds and sounding out words, which she
struggled with before. Since we had worked on sounds beforehand, I was nervous that
she was going to struggle with this rhyming assessment as well. Because of that, I faced
the challenge of sounding out words for her. Even though there were only four questions
to this, she still struggled with self confidence and continuously asked me for help and if
what she was doing was correct or not. Independently during the entire sheet, she
sounded the words out correctly and had no trouble until the third set of rhyming words.
She had a misunderstanding between cake, tape, and rake. Alexia first chose cake and
tape, but then self-corrected and chose the correct words cake and rake. This was a fairly
easy assessment for Alexia due to the fact that she could sound them out, even with the
self-correction on the third question. For this assessment, she understands part of, and is
working on the following standard:

K.4 The student will identify, say, segment, and blend various units of speech sounds.

b) Identify and produce words that rhyme.

Similar to the first assessment, I think that working on sounding out words and letter
sounds with Alexia will help improve her knowledge on differentiating word sounds as
well as recognizing rhyming words.
Andrea Nadeau
READ 366
11/7/18
 Andrea Nadeau
READ 366
11/7/18

Summary

In conclusion, there are no major concerns with Alexia’s literacy. She is at the typical
level for Kindergarteners in spelling, reading, and writing. After observing and going
over the results of each assessment, I believe that the main focus for Alexia’s literacy as
of right now is the differentiation of letter sounds and word sounds. While consonant
differentiation and pronunciation was prominent, her differentiation and pronunciation
with vowel sounds were not. I think that this will be improved through more practice and
instruction. But Alexia is not the only learner in this situation. As an aspiring teacher, I
recognized throughout these assessments that I have challenges that I need to face, the
hardest one being the need to help when a student is struggling during an assessment. I
tend to feel bad if I do not help the student with the correct answer. This will be easier to
beat when I am assessing the entire class, however, it will be much harder when
individually assessing students. I also have a challenge with giving assessments. I feel
like I am not as educated in the area of giving assessments and really want to improve in
that area. Furthermore, giving these assessments for the first time was a learning
experience for both Alexia and me.

References

Bear, D. R., Invernizzi, M., Johnston, F. R., & Templeton, S. (2012). Words their way: Word

study in action. Glenview, IL: Pearson Learning.

Tompkins, G. E. (2004). Literacy for the 21st century. Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Merrill/Prentice Hall.