Madison Farroni

Case Study Assessment (Revised)

October 30, 2018

Oral Reading Fluency

The first assessment I completed with my student was the Oral Reading Fluency check. For this
assessment, we completed it in the library which is our typical setting. I learned that this might not be
the most practical environment to administer this assessment. With other students being tested in the
same room, there was confusion as to whose timer belonged to who when one would go off. I know this
effected my student’s score for this assessment. This confusion added unnecessary frustration for my
student. She was originally very excited to get to read about spiders as she loved nature and insects, but
she got easily frustrated when she would get distracted. With the attitude and distractions considered, I
still think the assessment was relatively accurate. On this assessment, my student read 74 words correct
per minute. I learned that one of her biggest areas for improvement in decoding. She gets confused with
consonant digraphs and will replace them with a single consonant. For example, she will “th” with “h”. I
also learned that my student omits conjunctions and other small words when reading. She still has good
comprehension, but she does not do well on fluency assessments because of this tendency.

Contextual Writing and Logical Sentences

For contextual writing, I gave my student the topic of her younger brother and told her to write a
paragraph. She proceeded to look at me very confused. She was excited to get to talk all about her little
brother but was very unimpressed and confused on how to write a paragraph. It was hard for me to not
help her, but I refrained and reassured her that whatever she wrote would be perfectly okay and this
was just for me to learn how to help her in the future. This turned her attitude around and she wrote
four sentences about her brother. This was the first time I had seen her write something that wasn’t her
name. Handwriting and letter formation are an area for improvement for my student based on this
assessment. I learned she has difficulty transferring what she says orally into written words because of
her level of letter sound correspondence. Writing will be a main area of focus for remediation. For
logical sentences, I had the student revise sentences she had previously written. The student did not
have many grammatical errors. Most of her errors were in spelling caused by a lack of basic phonological
concepts. With most errors being in spelling, I gave the student an “Old Lady Who…” book to reference
in place of a dictionary because the written sentence was based on this type of book. I did not give her
any clues as to how to use the book or what to look for, she did it all on her own. This showed me a
strength in metacognition because she showed she knows how to recognize where she is wrong and
actively look to correct her mistakes. I found some of the same areas for improvement in this area
including handwriting and letter formation along with basic phonics principles. These assessed
conventions as well as idea, word choice, sentence structure, and organization.
 Sequencing

For this assessment, I had my student silently read the book called “There was an old lady who
swallowed a Fly” and orally read the book called “There was an old lady who swallowed a frog” and then
fill out a sequencing map. The map included boxes with arrows between them that she had to fill with
objects the old lady swallowed in the correct order, and a place to tell what happened at the end of the
story after everything had been swallowed. My student completed these two sequence maps without
using the book and did amazing. She did just as well with her silent read book as she did with the orally
read book. She loved completing them because the old lady books are her favorite, and she is confident
in her ability to sequence events. I learned that her confidence is backed up by her ability. She was able
to complete both maps correctly and had no questions or complaints while completing them. This is not
an area I fell my student needs remediation with.

Sentence Elaboration and Sentence Combining

I did these two assessments the same day and did them in a way that sentence elaboration led
into sentence combining. We did multiple examples aloud without writing because of how frustrated
she gets when writing and one of each assessment written. For the sentence elaboration, I gave her a
sentence and told her to elaborate or make it better. She did this really well, and although her writing is
still and area for improvement, she was able to convey her changes in writing. Both changes she made
were adjectives surrounding the topic of color but, I think this was still an assessment well done for this
student. For sentence combining, I had her take the two elaborated sentences and combine them into
one sentence since they were relative to each other regarding topic. She did this assessment well too.
She included the information from both sentences and used a conjunction. This allowed me to learn that
she does have a strength in writing regarding elaborating and combining predetermined sentences.

IRI Silent Reading Comprehension

For this assessment, I had my student read the third-grade form A passage and orally answer the
comprehension questions. While silently reading I recognized that she used finger tracking, a
metacognitive skill she does not use when orally reading. She was able to answer the comprehension
questions with ninety percent accuracy. Based on the comprehension questions, I know she has
strengths regarding main idea, detail, cause and effect, and making inferences. I also know that her
areas that need improvement based on this assessment are vocabulary and sequencing. I now know
that I can have her read third or fourth grade passages and texts and expect her to be capable of
manipulating the information within. She was not a fan of silent reading which I expected from her
because she loves to talk and be expressive when reading orally. I think it was also difficult for her to not
be able to orally sound out difficult words. She asked at the end of this assessment to not do another
silent read which was how she showed her level of frustration with the task.
 Idea and Organization

I assessed two traits of writing, idea and organization, with the same assessment. My student has very
poor self-esteem regarding her writing, so I thought a good way to combat this was to have her be an
author of her own book. We have been working on this book a few minutes every time we are together
if she is cooperative with the assessments and activities we need to complete for the day. The first day
we worked on the book, we did a brainstorm. She cam up with the idea of making her own old lady book
but having herself take place of the old lady. She was also able to come of with ten different objects that
she was going to swallow in her book. This showed me that she is very capable of coming up with
creative writing topics. It also taught me that she can paraphrase an idea and turn it into her own. She
followed the outline of the old lady stories she had read and changed them to fit her own book. My
student showed me her ability to organize her writing by taking the randomized list of ten objects and
putting in an order that made logical sense. For example, she had herself swallow a fish tank to hold the
water she swallowed previously. She was so excited to start working on her book and to be able to call
herself an author that she did not have the time to be self-conscious about her writing ability.

Vocabulary- Pronunciation and Definitional

I assessed my student’s vocabulary by using the first provided list. This list included the following
words: ached, concentrate, discovery, educated, effort, improved, and inspired. I wrote each word down
individually and had her pronounce them and tell me what she thought they meant. I wrote down how
she pronounced them phonetically or put a check for correct pronunciation and an x for no attempt. I
also wrote down the definition she told me. I learned from this assessment that vocabulary is a major
area that needs improvement especially in the area of basic phonics principles. She pronounced less
than half of the words correctly and gave the correct definition for fewer terms. I think decoding
practice would really benefit her vocabulary because she would be able to better pronounce the words
which would lead her to more accurate definitions. The student showed metacognition by guessing
what the vocabulary words were based off the first few letters she recognized. She showed she has
further knowledge definitionally because she gave the correct definitions of the incorrect terms that she
guessed. She was very hesitant with this assessment and was not confident at all. My student is very
aware of areas where she is strong and areas that need improvement and her emotions match them
perfectly.

Vocabulary- Contextually

I completed this assessment the same way I completed the other vocabulary assessment. I used
the first provided vocabulary list with the words: ached, concentrate, discovery, educated, effort,
improved, and inspired. I showed the student the vocabulary words and had her use them in a sentence
based on the definition she provided. I wrote down the sentence she gave me. Although she did not
necessarily have the correct definition, she used the words correctly in the sentence based on the
definition she did have. This allowed me to learn that she understands words contextually when she
knows the correct definition. I also learned that she is very good at applying her schema to create a
sentence that uses a word. One area that she struggled with at first was that she used the definition she
gave in the sentence instead of the word however, she self-corrected this mistake which showed
metacognition skills. She had a very positive attitude during this assessment because she knew she was
doing well. I now know that teaching her a word contextually will not be one of my main focuses during
the remediation period.