Instructional Goals

As the student worked through the assessments and the reading passages, it was not

difficult to come up with some basic learning objectives. Her QRI reading level was instructional

with both comprehension and word accuracy on her 2nd grade narrative passage. This is only a

year behind her current grade level in school. I did not take the time to have her try the 3rd grade

narrative passage because her comprehension was at frustration level with the 2nd grade

expository. If she was able to fill in some of these gaps, she may be to get back to grade level

reading instruction. We ended up working on one overall goal and three objectives to reinforce

it. As stated before, reading comprehension is one of her biggest weaknesses and listening

comprehension is a strength. I will discuss this further below.

Reading Comprehension

The main goal of reading is to understand what you have read. Reading comprehension is

not only a skill that I saw the student struggle with but also one of her IEP goals. The results

from her Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-III states that listening comprehension grade

level equivalent was 3rd grade 4th month from November of her 2nd grade year. This shows that

her comprehension difficulties probably do not come from lack of focus or processing issues but

her ability to read and understand what she has read. Improving reading comprehension is the

focus of the case study but by addressing other goals it will ultimately help strengthen her

reading comprehension in the long run.

Student will be able to improve reading comprehension by acknowledging punctuation

I decided to test the theory that her lack of proper punctuation usage was one of the main

reasons she has comprehension difficulties. She just reads word after word, which makes the
passage unclear. Also, since she doesn’t stop at the end of each sentence, she is not taking the

time to take in what she just read. We discussed what the purpose of punctuation was and why it

was important. Then we went through and highlighted the punctuation in the first chapter to help

her better notice it before we read it.

Student will be able to improve overall comprehension by increasing vocabulary

Improving vocabulary will help with reading comprehension but it will also help with

communication skills and higher levels of thinking. Starting a lesson with a vocabulary review is

helpful for the student for those reasons. It is possible to pause as you read the story to bring up

vocabulary words in context but that can break up the story and become a hinderance to

comprehension too. In this case study I decided to talk through vocabulary words while the

student worked on a vocabulary word search.

Student will be able to learn vowel combinations to improve overall comprehension skills

Learning vowel combinations will improve the student's phonics knowledge and word

attack skills. This student was confident sounding out words but was usure of what to do when

she came across vowel combinations. This is more of a long-term goal but again I wanted to see

if it was helpful to work on this goal even if we didn’t have the time to work though all parts of

it. I started the lesson by going over vowel combinations ai, ea, and ou.