Diagnostic Assessment, Research Paper Example

Introduction 

This paper provides a brief summary of the literacy lessons that the students covered in class. After the instructions the students were assessed on reading skills to determine if there is a student who has not yet understood or struggling in understanding major literacy reading and writing strategies.

Brief summary of student’s struggles and strengths

It was found that one some student still had difficulties in some literacy strategies and as a result they needed further instructions so that they can perfect and understand properly their literacy skills. For instance, one student had problems in reading a text fluently although he was good in story retell, spelling, and making inference. The student had received fluency instructions with other students but still struggled with reading fluently and this affected him greatly in comprehending texts. The student had scored overall 45 % in literacy lesson. His score was below average and there was a need to arrange a remedial lesson for the student to catch up with others. The student demonstrated that he can learn and becomes an expert in reading but could still read slowly with low prosody and less expression although smooth. Slow reading with less expression denied the student actual enjoyment of interesting aspects of a reading and this led to difficulties in recognizing words effortlessly and automatically. In reading the student showed some strength of reading with confidence although brushing needed to be done for perfection.

Assessment used to identify student need and at least one area of strength

Students were assessed after literacy instruction (fluency mini-lesson) to identify their understanding ability and any needs that each student may need to be experts in reading. The assessment was issued for the purpose of instructional decision-making and to monitor student’s progress. The assessment tool that was used to identify student progress and need in fluency reading is Analytical Reading Inventory (ARI) (Woods, & Moe, 2003). ARI is a reading assessment tool that I designed to help me make decisions for students in grade 4. The assessment measured independent, instructional and frustration reading levels of each student. I personally was responsible in administering the test. After the test it was evident that not all students had progressed through reading stages at the same rate. Thus there were some students who needed different kinds of support from me. For instance, some students were able to decode words but slowly and with great effort (Boison, 2003). Others were very good fluent readers but lacked vocabulary and the ability to ready with strategy for comprehension (Woods, & Moe, 2003).

Pre-intervention findings based on assessment

Through professional development, I was able to recognize from the first assessment the importance of various components of reading and identified necessary assessment and instruction intervention to support the students in developing these components. I was able to get the view of student progress beyond student’s ability to decode the words and memorize the text. The ability of student’s automatic word recognition, that is, the ability of the student reading high fluency words with accuracy and fluency was low. As well, the student ability of making inferences and monitoring and repairing understanding when reading different stories was low. The use of student fluency rating assessment tool showed that the student’s correct word per minute on an oral reading of a passage was low and needed improvements. Because a particular student had problems with fluency it was hard for him to connect word recognition and comprehension. The fact that, the reader constantly stopped to decode and figure out the difficult/ unknown word, he mostly lost the meaning of the passage and the process of reading become long and laborious. I concluded that, the struggling student will make improvements in reading and comprehension if he makes important gains in fluency. That is, he will be able to put more energy into comprehension and will be able to analyze, interpret, draw conclusions and make inferences from passages/ texts. Based on the assessments, the student had proper understanding of one component of fluency that is accuracy (ability to read words in the text/ pronounce the words with confidence) but had very little knowledge on the rate (speed of coding) and prosody (stress, intonation, and pauses or “reading with feeling”).

Strategy identified based on the student need and strengths

Based on the students need in fluency, improvement on the rate of decoding words and prosody, I developed strategies to enable the struggling students to learn the lesson and become experts in text reading. the strategies were based on the four component of fluency instruction which include; model fluent reading, use of paired guided oral reading instructions, give students away to practice and perform, implementing word study activity to build fluency. The best component/ strategy that would better address the student need for fluency improvement was Paired reading. This is an ideal fluency- building technique to use with struggling or less skilled readers who fear reading alone. It involves the student and the teacher reading together from the text. When the teacher/ instructor recognizes that they read together with the student smoothly and faster with prosody, he allows the student to read alone while he listens/ follows silently along the text. Whenever the student makes a reading error or misreads a word, the instructor supplies the correct word immediately and the two resumes reading aloud in tandem (Boison, 2003).

Lesson implementation based on the best practices is described

Based on the best practices, the following lesson was identified to help in teaching fluency struggling student. The lesson topic was Paired Reading. This lesson “paired Reading “is a simple but effective technique of enabling readers who struggle when reading to increase their reading fluency and accuracy of the texts (Boison, 2003).

Description of the lesson

The struggling student reads aloud in tandem with the teacher. When the student signals the teacher by a snap, the teacher stops reading while the student continues on reading alone. Immediately the student commits a reading error, the teacher supplies the correction and resumes reading in tandem. Materials needed for this lesson include a reading book. When administering this lesson to the students, the teacher sits in a quiet place without distractions and position the book selected for reading session so that the teacher and the student can easily read/ follow the text. The in structure will inform the student that they are going to read together for a little while and whenever the student will want to reads alone, he should snap to signal the teacher to stop reading. If the student will encounter a word he does not know, the teacher will tell him the word and they will read together (Boison, 2003).

After giving the student instructions, the teacher and the student will begin reading when the student makes a mistake or misreads the word, the teacher stops pronounces the word and asks the student to repeat it till he reads it correctly. When the student reads the word correctly the teacher resumes reading through the passage. When the student signal the teacher, the teacher stops reading and follow silently through the reading and when the student does a good job pronouncing hard words correctly the teacher praises the student occasionally. If the student takes more than five seconds pronouncing a word, or skips a word or alone, the teacher should point to the word and pronounce it and ask the student to pronounce it alone and then resume reading in tandem with the student. The process continues till the student again signal the teacher to read alone.

This lesson will best improve the student need of fluency components i.e. accuracy, prosody, and faster and smoother reading. Proficiency of the three components of fluency will help struggling student to improve text comprehension and reading skills.

Description of reassessment after lesson

After the lesson of pared reading, struggling students will be reassessed to measure their reading ability after the instructions. ARI assessment tool will be used in reassessment because the tool is the best in assessing independence, instructional and frustration reading levels of each student. Reassessment will be formative and will be administered by the teacher in the class (Woods, & Moe, 2003). The reassessment will be focused on student understanding of reading word accuracy, rate of reading and prosody.

Repeated reading rate Assessment: this test will assess rate of reading. This assessment will involve the student reading the text. Teacher counts the number of words that student read correctly in one minute. The student repeatedly reads the same text and the teacher charts the progress of the student on a graph. The teacher will show the student his progress and encourage the student to read faster each time (Boison, 2003).

Miscue analysis assessment: this will test accuracy. The teacher will give the student a script with a passage to read and remain with the same copy. The teacher will mark any incorrect reading or omissions of words as the student reads the script. Teacher will show the student the number of mistakes committed and make corrections immediately (Boison, 2003).

Post- intervention findings identified percentage of growth in area of weakness.

After identifying the students who struggled with fluency and identified appropriate intervention depending on each students need great improvements was registered. Students who had scored below average improved significantly and scored highly during the second round formative and summative assessments. Student’s rate of reading, accuracy and prosody improved by 70%. For example a student who struggled with reading faster, accurately and with prosody was able to improve his percentage score in overall literacy assessment from 45% score before intervention to 75% after intervention. From the assessment, post- intervention, it can be concluded that, the struggling students benefited a lot from the strategic lesson on fluency. The student who was lagging behind after the first classroom mini-lesson instructions showed great text comprehension skills and some expertise in literacy. Struggles could make significant, inferences, story retells, automatic word recognition, proper question asking skills after reading a text; demonstrate proper spelling, and overall text comprehension (Boison, 2003).

References

Boison, C. (2003). Development and uses of a 100 high-frequency sight word recognition list for children with reading failure. In A. Arua (Ed.), Reading for all in Africa (pp. 77-79). Newark, DE: IRA

Woods, M.L. & Moe, A.J. (2003). Analytical Reading Inventory, Seventh Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall. ISBN: 0-13-097942-2