#7 Running Records

The first student I assessed is a 5th grade student who speaks Spanish as his native language. This student, whom I will call, "J" also receives special education services in reading and reads at approximately a 1st grade level. The readability level of the passage was 1.5 grade equivalent.

J mispronounced 18 of the 126 words he was scored on. J's error rate was 1:6 and accuracy was 83%. J read 15 words per minute and 12 words correct per minute. J did a lot of guessing based on the first sound or letter of the word, for example, he substituted organism for oxygen. This error was meaning changing but somewhat related to the text "What Comes from Plants". J dropped some suffixes which is a typical error for Spanish speaking students as Spanish words do not have suffixes. J's primary difficulty with the text was being able to decode the text. This text was not meant to be frustrating but it was good information for me to adapt the level of his independent and instructional level text even lower than it is currently.

The other student I assessed is a 2nd grade student who speaks Korean as his first language. I will refer to him as "A". A is a high-achieving student and read a passage about Mars. It was obvious that A enjoyed science and space and had a high level of background knowledge on this topic. A was able to read the symbol "F" as Fahrenheit even though the full word wasn't printed. His level of text structure was advanced. Some of the academic vocabulary was challenging as he had some miscues involving visual cue mistakes. A was proficient in decoding multisyllabic words and had very few syntax and visual cue errors. Clearly, A is an advanced reader and a high level of background knowledge definitely impacted his ability to read the text so accurately. Given a text on a topic he's more unfamiliar with, A probably wouldn't have been as successful. This reminds me as a teacher to insure to provide enough scaffolding and opportunities to activate background knowledge and I may need to use less scaffolding for topics students are familiar with.