Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Marla Leland Jayleen Case Study Assessment Information 10 18 14
Marla Leland Jayleen Case Study Assessment Information 10 18 14
books. This is a pretty high level book for her reading comprehension scores.
I am wondering if she reads them completely. Her favorite book that she has
read recently was Dear Dumb Diary. I am not familiar with this book.
Interestingly though, she said she had no favorite picture books. I even
prodded her asking if she had a favorite book when she was younger, she
said no. I personally felt a little sad about this because some of my fondest
memories were reading with my mother and I have a number of favorites.
This might be a huge indicator about her literary experiences at home and
preschool. She may not have had a lot of literary exposure outside of school.
The questions then moved on to reflect on Jayleens broader views on
reading and writing. I asked her, how do you know someone is a good
reader? She said that they read fast. Then I asked, what do you think makes
a good writer? She said they can write fast. She commented that her uncle
was a really fast typist. I asked, do you consider yourself a good writer? She
said yes because I can write neatly. The next question was why do people
read and write and Jayleen said so that when they grow up they can write
and read well. All of her answers were based on output, what is seen on the
outside when you read and write. She does not appear to understand the
real value of reading for the benefit of pleasure or knowledge. This is
something I hope to change. I would like her to understand that reading is
for a purpose. The last question asked was what do you do if you cant read
a word. She said that she reads it in little chunks, then puts it all together.
That is a great answer which means she understands how to approach
2
phonics problems. In fact when I have read with her, she does try to work
through words that she doesnt know by trying to sound them out through
letter patterns.
The next assessment I gave her was the Garfield Elementary Reading
Attitude Survey. She scored a total of 52 points, which between the slightly
happy and slightly upset Garfield. Pretty much indicating from the directions
that she is indifferent to reading. When administering the test, I thought
maybe at first she was making a pattern with the circling of the figures; but
after reviewing it I think her answers seemed to be relatively accurate to her
perspectives, especially comparing them to her interview answers. Overall
Jayleen scored a 31%, which means again she has a pretty much indifferent
attitude to reading. Her recreational interest was higher than her overall
score, ranking 45%, which is ranked below the median for her grade. When
looking at the questions more closely Jayleen answers indicate she would
rather be playing instead of reading during her free time. I think this is
perfectly understandable for her age but when combined with her other
answers it is cause for some concern.
Her academic attitude was much lower compared to her recreational
score at 26%, showing she has little interest in academic reading. Based
upon her answers to the last 10 questions, she does not like to read aloud in
class or take tests (who does really). She seems to be okay with using
resources like dictionaries and writing on worksheets. She consistently was
member on what I read. She basically went through the pictures. Jayleens
retelling of the story went something like this: some fish live under the deep
water and glow in the dark with big and small eyes. In the ocean small
ocean animals eat small fish. There are many different layers in the ocean.
Big fish are mean and eat the small fish. Essential Jayleen was on the right
track, the chapter was about the different environments within the ocean
and the creatures that live there. Unfortunately without the pictures in the
chapter, I do not think Jayleen would have come up with these ideas. I do
think it was great that Jayleen could interpret the pictures accurately and be
able to contribute to retelling the story through the use of them. She has
developed the ability to visually think about what might be going on in the
story based on pictures in the story. She is applying the visual strategy of
reading comprehension.
After I read the first chapter and realized a chapter was too long for
Jayleen to retain the information, so I ask her to read the first paragraph of
the next chapter. Unfortunately the book had very big vocabulary words for
her. She was focusing a lot on reading and decoding the words. She
retained really no information about the passage (see the retelling score
form). She could not tell me what the passage was about, no details. I think
she kind of gave up. I felt bad that I choose a text that was not at the right
level for her. I had not done the reading inventory on her yet; but I felt now it
was a priority, in order to determine better suited books for her.
In addition, I took a running record on this part of the text. She was
quite fluid in her reading. She was almost like a robot, zipping through the
punctuation. She got hung up on the large vocabulary words. Interestingly,
these were the italicize words in the text with punctuation notations. These
notations might have confused or intimidated her, so she had more trouble
with decoding. Other than these larger vocabulary words she did a very nice
job on decoding. I did not scrutinize her pronunciations. I probably should
assess this closer. She did substitute a couple of words. The replacements
were close to the idea of the actual word such as flip for flipper and bodies
for bones. She was not reading the word but replacing them, probably
because she was trying to read faster.
The next read aloud I did with Jayleen was a fictional picture book. I
decide to read a book from my childhood that I read to my children. My girls
are especially fond of it because it is about a little squirrel that lives in a cute
little house on top of an oak tree. I thought Jayleen would like it as well. The
book is titled Ms. Suzy. Jayleen seemed to enjoy the book as we were reading
it. However, I did notice that since we were outside of the classroom, there
were a lot of distractions in the environment. People were walking back and
forth on campus. When I asked Jayleen to retell the story she was very brief
in her descriptions. Jayleen was very good about knowing the basic sequence
of the story and the overall plot. She mentioned each of the main
characters. She basically summarized the skeleton plot of the soldiers
getting Ms. Suzys house back to her. She did elaborate on any details of the
6
story or the soldiers relationship to Ms. Suzy. I believe she was unaware of
the larger plot on how Ms. Suzy became a mother figure to the soldiers.
Jayleen is very brief with her answers. When asked about describing Ms.
Suzys house she only described two things in the house. Ms. Suzys house
was full of tiny details acorn cups, a fire place, a small broom that she
made, firefly lamp, etc. I am not sure if Jayleen could not remember the
details, could not associate her background knowledge with the details or
just wanted to answer the questions as briefly as possible. Unfortunately
when tallying Jayleens answers on the retelling checklist she only got a 29.
It was because of her brief answers. I would like to have her try extending
her knowledge of stories. I think in the future she would benefit from graphic
organizers to help her extract more details and information from the texts.
The read alouds and retells gave me a lot of information about Jayleen.
I think that it will be important to make sure she is reading books at her
reading level. She needs to be able to read the words so she can focus on
comprehending the text. Also it will be important to find books that she is
interested in. She seems to shut down when she is uninterested. She has a
hard time remembering the information after she hears or reads the text.
Graphic organizers might help her to recall the information easier. In
addition, explicitly teaching vocabulary and relating it to her life would be
important to helping her expand her word knowledge. Lastly teaching her
some reading comprehension strategies such as questioning, inferring, visual
cues, etc will be invaluable tools for her to help her think about what she is
reading.
The third type of assessment I conducted with Jayleen was the Informal
Reading Inventory. I started with the word lists. She breezed through preprimer through level 3. On level 4 she had a really hard time. The list
seemed to step up in difficulty. She missed 10 of the words, where on level 3
she only missed 1 of the words. The words she missed on level 4 had
multiple vowels in them. She tended to have difficulty with the vowel in the
last part of the word / last syllable. More phonics testing might help
determine if Jayleen has some difficulty blending certain sound
combinations.
Based upon the word lists, I started Jayleen on passage level 2 for
reading comprehension. On this passage, she only had four word recognition
errors and those were just mispronunciations, which according to the scoring
was around a 96%. I thought that was really good. On the reading
comprehension questions, she got 3 questions incorrect, which is a 62.5%.
She was able to understand some details and sequence about the story and
the cause and effect of the wolfs present. However, she was slightly off on
the main idea in the story. She thought the main idea was about the
grandfather not wanting Peter to go into the forest. Although that was
partially right, the story was more about how Peter disobeyed his
grandfather. Jayleen was on the right track but missed seeing the deeper
meaning of the story. Along these lines see also question 6, the idea of Peter
disobeying the grandfather eluded her she just thought that Peter got up
early because he wanted to go to the garden. In addition, she had some
9
10
11
Assessment #4 Writing
For the writing assessment, I so far I have been able copy two writing
samples. One is an All About Me questionnaire. It is in a complete the
sentence format. Jayleen answered all the questions and was succinct in her
replies. She had some mechanically errors but they did not take away from
the meaning of her sentences. Jayleen does not elaborate on her answers.
She uses simple sentence structures and does not try to put too many ideas
down on paper. She used a lot of and transitions to write multiple ideas. I
think she is on the right track with her writing. She is thinking about her
responses and is really focused when she answers the questions. It would be
great though if I could help Jayleen try to expand upon her ideas with more
details. Interestingly Jayleens answers on this document correspond to her
answers on the reading interview I gave her. It is nice to see that she is
consistent with her answers. It shows that these are really things that she is
interested in. This is really good information for me to help find more
engaging information for her to read and write about.
12
13
14