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Introduction
A is 7 years old and will turn 8 before school starts. He repeated first grade last year and will enter 2nd grade this fall.  End of the year testing shows that he is still not at the level he needs to be when entering 2nd grade.  He has ADHD and is taking medication in order to focus.  He loves to talk. 

A lives with his mom, dad, and younger two sisters.  He spends time playing games with his 5 year old sister. When choosing books, I found one on hamsters that he wanted to read to his sister, because she has a hamster.  He has many books at home and practices reading often.  A also enjoys spending time with his grandma. She provides him with a variety of experiences.  He went to beach with her this summer.  While they were there, the string rays were feeding on the abundance of algae at the shoreline.  They were unable to swim, but spent many hours watching the rays. He is interest in reading books about sting rays now. He relates and talks well with adults. 



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Pre-Assessments


Interest/Attitude Survey

I live with: mom, dad, and 2 sisters

When I get home from school I like to: play games with my oldest sister like hide and seek or Candyland

My favorite TV show is: Sponge Bob

My favorite movie is: Scooby Doo

My favorite movie star is: Patrick Star

I play an instrument: the guitar, but my sister broke the strings.  I will have to get new strings.

I participate in a sport called: baseball – pitching machine.  I was on the Dragon team.

I listen to music and my favorite group/singer is: Kid Rock

I spend time on my hobby: hunting and shooting guns with my dad

My favorite subject in school is: Math! I’m real good at math!

My favorite thing to read is: (This answer took some thought.) A book with a three headed dog that I have on my big book shelf that my dad made me.  It is full of books.

Topics I like to read about include:  Sponge Bob, The Boy Who Cried Wolf (I also found out that he likes non-fiction books.  Sting rays are of special interest right now. 

My plans for my future include: learning to drive a car

Other things I would like to share about me:  (Thinks hard.) I am good at coloring!

Burke Reading Inventory

1. When you are reading and come to something you don’t know, what do you do?  Sound it out

 Do you ever do anything else?  Yes, I think about it in my head.

2. Who is a good reader you know?  my best friend, Juan (name changed)

3. What makes Juan a good reader? He is smart.  He read to level 20.

4. Do you think Juan ever comes to something he doesn’t know?  Yes

5. When Juan does come to something he doesn’t know, what do you think he does?  Sounds it out

6. If you knew someone was having trouble reading, how would you help that person?  Helping them read; tell them the words

7. What would a/your teacher do to help that person?  Tell them to put a finger on the word and sound it out.

8. How did you learn to read?  By practicing at home

9. What would you like to do better as a reader? Science and work in a lab 

10. Do you think you are a good reader? Why?  Yes, I practice every day. 

Running Record - recorded miscues  

Audio - click here to hear A read (this has been disconnected).   More reading.

 

Unaided/ Aided Retelling

Unaided Retelling:

Morris thought Cow was a moose like him.  He said, “Let’s ask someone else.”  They asked Deer who Cow was.  Then they said, “Let’s ask someone else.”  Then they asked a horse.  Then they figured out who they were.

Aided Retelling:

How did they figure that out?  By looking in the water.

Why was Morris mixed up?  Because of the horns

Is there anything else you want to tell me about the story?  Shakes head no.

Comments:

A did speak in complete sentences during the unaided retelling.  He told the details in chronological order.  He named the characters, but gave no character development.  He gave little in depth comments beyond the wording of the story. 

Fluency Rate

A read at his instructional level (about a 1.5 reading level) with a fluency of 43 wpm.  In one minute he read 47 words with 4 errors.  I also tested his fluency with the DIBELS end of the year fluency tests.  Look for those results in the DIBELS testing. 

Dibels Assessments 

I tested A with all of the end of the year first grade DIBLES benchmarks.  On the Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, he scored a 29. This score is in the emerging level of 10-34.  On the Nonsense Word Fluency, he scored 26.  This is in the deficit level (0-29).  On Oral Reading Fluency, his middle score of the three tests was 26 wpm.  This score shows some risk(20-39).  On his Retell Fluency, his retell included 18 words, and the Word Use Fluency his score was a 24.  For the Retell and Word Use Fluency tests, there are no established benchmark goals. 

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Analysis of Data

Coded Story

Coding Sheet

Miscue Analysis
Besides the information shown above, I have another coded story and analysis on A.  He was very interested in reading about stingrays.  We found a first grade level book on them, but it was a little too hard.  After the first running record, he wanted to read the stingray books, too.  I turned on the recorder and used this information in my analysis as well.

A used some syntax to help him correct sentences.  In general, he replaced a part of speech with the same part of speech in the Morris the Moose story.  Eight of his 53 sentences were not syntactically acceptable.  On the hard nonfiction book, over half of the sentences had grammatical errors. 

A used meaning to self-correct mistakes in the story.  He had very few nonsense words in his miscues.  This means that he is trying associate the words he is trying to decoding with words in his vocabulary, although they may not have made sense in the sentence.  He did substitute a few words with the same general meaning like cold for cool and shouted for yelled.  This shows that he is using semantic information.  He also corrected miscue that distorted meaning.  Meaning did not work well for him in the nonfiction passage.

A usually identifies the onset when trying to decode words, but misses the rime.  He is paying attention to the beginning, but not the ending of words. On DIBELS, A was scored in the lower end of the emerging range on the Phoneme Segmentation Fluency.  This means that when he hears a word, he can break it into phonemes.  On the DIBELS Nonsense Word Fluency, his score was in the deficit range.  On this test, he had to read CVC pattern words. He could either say the whole word or each phoneme.  He got 11 of 15 onsets right and 7 of 15 rimes right. 

A does use all three cuing systems during reading. He does use some letter-sound matching, but mostly uses meaning.  This works well for him in the Morris the Moose passage, but in the nonfiction passage he needed to use more graphophonics to figure out unfamiliar words.  Meaning was not as successful for him in this situation.  Only identifying the onset gave him no clues to the word or meaning with new terminology.  He needed to be able to determine the rimes as well. 

His retell shows that even though he uses meaning to figure out words, he many not be reading for deeper meaning.  He only recalled surface knowledge.  He does have a good beginning with how to self-correct errors if they do not make sense.  One of A’s weaknesses is his ability to read fluently.  This probably affects his recall and comprehension of the story.  His fluency is weak in all three areas: accuracy, speed, and intonation. 

Developmental Reading Stage 

It appears that A is in the beginner level of reading.  He is still learning to read and to use a variety of cueing strategies to figure out words.  His fluency needs work.  His word recognition is in the partial-alphabetic phase because he uses only part of the alphabetic cues.  He remembers some sight words and often uses guessing strategies to read words. He uses partial letters combined with context cues to guess the identities of unfamiliar words. 

Summary of Data 

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Short Term Planning & Teaching


Short Term Plan

A read with little expression.  He did not differentiate between all the other words and those in all capital letters.  I am interested to see what he notices from listening to his recording of the story and to see if he knows why words are sometimes written in all capitals in a story.  

Retrospective Miscue Analysis  (Formative Treatment)

After giving A directions, we began listening to his tape.  The first miscue he noted was the substitution of I for you.  I stopped the tape next to point out that he self-corrected when he noticed that what he read did not make sense.  I offered praise for using this good reader strategy.  He seemed reluctant to talk about his miscues.  The next time we stopped the tape, we discussed his made up word for cried.  He then used the context of the sentence to figure out the meaning.  Next we stopped the tape on the miscues for laughed.  He seemed to have trouble with the “ed” ending.  We talked about the three sounds that “ed” can make and wrote them on the board.  I then had him pick out “ed” words from the book and listen for which sound they made.  He had a hard time hearing them.  I stretched the words out for him to listen to and then try himself.  He did better this way.  We continued listening to the tape and stopped next at the word sighed.  He called it “sitted” (probably due to the cow kneeling in the picture). I told him this word and asked if he knew what it meant.  He did not, so we discussed and acted out the meaning.  The last stop we made was on the word smiled, that he read as “something.”  He noticed that the sentence did not make sense, but could not figure out the word smiled.  Looking at the picture and noticing the first two letters helped.

Taped Book

After the retrospective analysis, I had him listen to the tape of the book read by Marie Carbo (and a gentleman) and listen to see if she did anything differently than he did when she read the story.  After several words in all capitals had been read, I stopped to tape to ask him if he had noticed anything.  He said, “No.” I asked if he knew what a word in all capitals meant.  Again, he said he did not.  I encouraged him to notice what the reader in the tape did when she came to one of those words and started the tape again.  When the first side of the tape was finished playing, I asked what the reader did when she came to words with all big letter.  He replied, “Shout it out!”  I commented that they did shout it out and just say it a little louder.  We finished listening to the tapes.

Repeated Reading

I then explained the importance of rereading the same book several times to improve reading.  I had him begin to read the story.  He did not place emphasis on the first 2 large print words.  I asked him what the capital letters meant for him to do.  He said to read it louder.  For the rest of the story, he read them louder and his overall expression was better too.  He self corrected most of his mistakes when they did not make sense.  Two times he paused when the story did not make sense and tried to figure it out.  When he could not, he kept going.  I praised him for noticing that it did not make sense and discussed the strategy of rereading if it doesn’t make sense.  He self-corrected and used the clues to figure out some words that he had misses before.  A couple of time I asked him to read that again, and he corrected on the second reading.  I also pointed out to him that he read “cold, blue stream” (he did this with both readings) which made sense, but a different word for cold (cool) was used in the sentence.  

Summary

These short-term interventions worked great.  A’s confidence improved with the second reading, and he seemed to enjoy reading the story.  He seemed almost excited.  The retrospective miscue analysis is a great tool to turn an assessment into a learning experience for the child.  It also helps the teacher to learn more about the student’s reading and how to support and instruct the student.  I plan to share this idea with classroom teachers.  I will use it again!

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Long Term Instructional Plan

Strengths

Note: this case study is a sample "in progress"
These remaining parts allow the viewer to see the template being used.

Weaknesses



Recommendations
(try to include some form of technology)



Progress Monitoring - Goals & Timeline
(check benchmarks and set up a timeline chart to insure improvement in a timely fashion; if your student is advanced beyond grade level, then you can still have goals for your student--they just won't be "benchmark" (low) goals and you won't be in such a hurry to get there. All children have something they can improve).