Marla Leland / EDUC 5165

Literacy Case Study: Assessment information

Assessment #1 Reading Attitude and Reading Interest Interview
For my beginning assessments on Jayleen I conducted a reading
interest interview and a reading attitude survey to help determine her
interests outside of school and her interest in reading. I felt using both these
assessments would help me understand Jayleen better and help me find
appropriate literature that she is interested in. Jayleen gave me some very
intriguing answers which has helped me better understand her strengths and
weaknesses. On the reading interest survey the first questions aimed at
overall hobbies and interests. Jayleen said that her favorite thing to do
afterschool is to go to the pool and swim. Apparently where she lives has a
community pool that she can walk to with her family. She also enjoys playing
volleyball and watching movies. One of her favorites is Willy Wonka. Its
nice that is a movie that came from a book. Maybe this will be a future book
that can be read to her or she can read by herself.
Her three topmost wishes are to get a free car, be rich and be a
teacher. We laughed about the car I said thats interesting you cant even
drive yet. The teacher wish is interesting I am glad she respects education
and her teachers. She must have had some good experiences in order to
want to model after her teachers. Along similar lines, her favorite subject in
school is art. I was thinking that I could incorporate this interest into some
projects / activities we do together. She says she owes and reads Judy Moody
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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
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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

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very disinterested in school reading materials and activities like reading

different stories in class and being asked questions about reading. I am not
particularly surprised by these results. As described in the background
section, Jayleen seems pretty disengaged during class time. I think she has
a hard time identifying with the subject matter and/or is completely
uninterested or bored. One reason for this attitude could be her lack of exposure
to word meaning/ vocabulary. Jayleen attitude about reading is also in line
with her performance. It is reasonable to assume that because she is behind
in her academic literacy, her attitude about that type of literacy is lack luster.
Assessment #2 Read Alouds and Retells
To begin my read alouds and retell assessments, I opted to read a nonfiction book first. Not for any particular reason just as a baseline. On hind
sight, I should have selected a fictional picture book or story. When I pulled
out the book Jayleen seemed excited about the subject matter. I gave her a
choice of a couple of books from the Treehouse Research collection. She
choose Dolphins and Sharks by Mary Osborne Pope. It is technically a
reading level of 2.6. I read the first chapter to Jayleen. First mistake, it was
way too long since I did not know her stamina level (as the Daily Five sisters
put it). Anyway, I completed the chapter and then ask Jayleen what it was
about (see the retelling scoring form). She had a hard time answering
without looking at the pictures in the book. I have to admit I read too long of
a chapter. I gave her the book to look through to see if it would jog her

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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.

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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
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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

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cues, etc will be invaluable tools for her to help her think about what she is
reading.

Assessment #3 Informal Reading Inventory

Marla Leland / EDUC 5165

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
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trouble with vocabulary. She associated meadow with forest, so her

vocabulary knowledge of this type of environment must be limited. As with
the Read Alouds and Retells, this assessment suggests that Jayleens reading
comprehension is lower than her reading/decoding skills, which was also
evident in the Read Aloud and Retell assessments.
I decided to try giving Jaylen passage 3, on hind sight I probably should
have given her passage 1 to see if her comprehension skills would match
this level. However, I had not scrutinized her reading comprehension results
on passage 2. When I briefly looked at them, they seemed better than after
my analysis. Needless to say she decreased in both word recognition and
comprehension. She had 12 errors in word recognition about a 93% or so. To
be fair she consistently got 2 of the words incorrect in the passage which
allocated for 6 of the errors. With this taken into consideration, I think she
did pretty well with her decoding and word recognition.
On the reading comprehension portion of passage 3, Jayleen answered
3.5 questions correctly, which gave her a total of 40%. Upon looking at her
answers, her basic understanding of the story was that the main character
lived outside and liked to whistle. When he got really cold, he put his hands
in his pockets. Jayleen unfortunately did not understand the main point of
the story. She was not able to determine the cause and effect of Crandall
situation. She understood certain specifics to the story; for example, Crandall
taught the birds how to sing or when he was cold he put his hands in his

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pockets. In addition, the musical instrument vocabulary gave her some

trouble both in word recognition and in vocabulary. She is not familiar with a
fife or fiddle, so she could not understand question 2. I think this is another
example of how her lack of vocabulary exposure affects her reading
comprehension. She cannot understand the passage because some the
words and ideas are not accessible to her. At this point, I would say that she
can read the words in the second grade level but her reading comprehension
is at a lower level maybe first grade level. I would like to see how well she
can comprehend the first grade passage. It might be a good idea in the
future for her to stop frequently while she reads to recall the idea of the
sentence or paragraph. As I mentioned previously graphic organizers may
also help her develop understanding her thinking as she reads.

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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.

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The second writing sample of Jayleens is about Disneyland. It was an

assessment to write a descriptive paragraph about a favorite place. The idea
was to try and have the students include sensory details to describe the
place. Her paragraph was organized in chronological order based upon her
recent visit to Disneyland. She did a nice job linking her ideas to central
theme and creating a sequential story. The writing however was not very
descriptive/ sensory. The only descriptive element she added was her
comment on how dark one of the rides was. She basically listed the details
of her trip. Like in her previous writing sample, she made some mechanic
errors but they did not detract from the meaning of the story. As I mention
previously, it would be nice if Jayleen could add some interesting details to
her stories. I think encouraging her to expand and express her ideas would
help her move to the next level in her writing. I would like to see some
additional work from her to see how she does on different types of creative
writing and research/ classroom writing. Being that her personality and
expression is pretty reserved, it would be a goal to see if she could express
more of her thoughts, feelings and experiences on paper. One way to help
her might be to have her write in a journal each day. Providing her with story
starters or questions that she could write about in a casual manner, might
help her expand on the descriptive elements of writing. With more
consistent experience she might open up and be more comfortable to
expand her imagination and personality into her writing.

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