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Student: 11 year old boy in fifth grade with special needs

Strengths: Identifying words in isolation, writing, using correct punctuation, taking his time and presenting his best work, eager to work and continue through multiple activities and tests

Areas for growth: Fluency, comprehension, identifying the main idea and making inferences

Recommendations: After working with this student, I found he was able to read through a sixth grade isolated word list. It is not the words in isolation that he has the difficulties with. When those same words were presented in the text, he was unable to identify them. He also scored low on the comprehension aspect of the QRI. I would recommend doing activities to build fluency such as, a self check for fluency. He enjoys reading so this would hold him accountable as he reads and then he will be able to see his own growth in reading. For comprehension, I would recommend task cards. This is a simple yet effective activity. He could do these if he finishes an assignment early, he could work with a partner, or he could use these at home. He will read the short passage and then pick from four multiple choice answers. The correct answer is listed on the back of the card. On the QRI, he ended up scoring independent on grade 3 but frustrational at grade 4. I found he did something similar in his F and P testing.

New learnings: I have definitely enjoyed learning about and how to give numerous new assessments. I have worked in AACPS since 2008 as a TA and have not been exposed to many of these tools that are very beneficial in understanding your learners strengths and weaknesses.

One thing I still feel I need to practice is the scoring of the assessments. I felt overwhelmed when scoring the QRI and hope as I use them more often that I will become more comfortable.

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Student: Ten year old, female, fourth grader with special needs
Strengths: She is very eager to learn and enjoys reading
Areas for Growth: word/letter spacing, punctuation, spelling, looking back in the text to help, vocabulary and comprehension
Recommendations: increase wh/ questions to increase comprehension skills, read books at home for 15-30 minutes and be asked questions about the text, look back at the text
Things learned: - How to administer the QRI it is something so interesting because it shows you what the student is capable of and where they are. The QRI really helps you determine the area a student is strong and weak in so you can really find many ways to assist your students.  – I found it very interesting how much you can take away from the word lists and the QRI it really helps you identify where your students are struggling so you can incorporate these things into lessons to reinforce skills.
What will I bring to the classroom: -I hope that I will be able to use the QRI on my students especially those who are struggling. I would love to see where are all of my students are so that I can incorporate things that they need. I could also try to give this at the beginning, middle, and end of the year so I can see the progress or identify a continuing problem area.

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Student: a 7 year old girl in first grade at a local public school.

Strengths: identifying words from the word lists, reading on grade level, her love for reading from a wide variety of book topics, and her patience when testing for hours.
Areas of needed growth: the student’s needed area of growth is with her comprehension of texts. She reads on grade level and is a fantastic reader, but struggles with comprehension of the material. She also struggled with the retelling of the story that she read.

My recommendation: I would recommend that she continue to read on grade level, but have someone read with her. When they are reading, I would have them break the text into smaller sections so she can discuss the text on a smaller level. This will allow her to understand the smaller sections and gradually put them together.

2 new findings:  One finding that I enjoyed was that I learned how to administrator and score a variety of assessments. I enjoyed giving the reading attitude assessments because this is a great way for teachers and/or parents to learn their students/child’s likes and dislikes. One finding that I did not like was the retelling portion of the QRI. It was hard to score some parts of that because the student would say a portion or a word and I felt that I could not give credit.

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This case study has given me practice on how to assess readers. It is something I know I'll have to do in the classroom and I think that  I understand more about how it is done and what techniques to use with readers now that I have more experience.

I have learned that readers have a large amount of skills that students  must master in order to successfully read. I thought I had an idea of the types of skills but all the subsections of the assessments opened my eyes a little wider to the vast array of reading skills required and how nuanced they could be.

I have also learned how much data the QRI and other reading assessments can produce. When done thoroughly, it can provide a lot of very useful data that can inform instructional decisions as large as which book to use in reading group or as small as punctuation formation.

Another thing I have learned is that even if a student struggles with comprehension, this might not be evident in the way they read. A student might be excellent at decoding and reading fluently but still be unable to understand the content of the story and make connections.

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Student: 8 year old, second grade, female
Strengths: great word recognition and decoding skills in isolation and in context.  She expressed a positive attitude towards reading and a variety of interests too.
Areas of needed growth: Reading comprehension and Fluency
Recommendations: Reading smaller chunks of stories (such as beginning, middle, and end) and practice with retelling.  Also, using graphic organizers, like story maps would help her better understand the different parts of a story and increase comprehension. In addition, partner reading would be an interactive way to practice both reading and listening comprehension, especially when taking turns reading sections of literature.  For fluency, I suggest more oral reading and "predictable books so that she can have have greater experience with reading similar language patterns - and even repeated readings.  Furthermore, the Burke Reading Interview highlighted a need for more reading role models, so I would encourage parents and teachers to provide routine times for recreational reading.  Also, a second grade book club (maybe before or after school) would be a lovely way to have students share information about the same book, and provide a positive way to increase comprehension.
2-3 new learnings:  I learned that this student was able to read many of the word lists and passages with ease - well beyond her grade level. However, I was surprised to find that even though she recognized words so well, she struggled to provide answer to concept and comprehension questions. It was interesting to see such a discrepancy between the two skills. I also learned that there are many parts and pieces to the QRI-5, which is quite time consuming. I'm sure with practice I would become more familiar, quicker, and more confident with giving such an extensive assessment. I spent alot of time trying to understand all the fundamentals of the QRI-5 and now I have a greater appreciation for reading assessments!

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Student: Eight year old, male, third grader
Strengths: Explicit comprehension (instructional level was 6th grade for comprehension and the majority of the correct questions were explicit comprehension), positive attitude toward reading, consistency while writing, text evaluation, vocabulary knowledge
Areas for Growth: word/letter spacing (more than 3/4 of the letters did not sit on the lines), punctuation, reading regulation/metacognitive aspects, implicit comprehension,  limited attention span
Recommendations: focusing activities like meditation or yoga in order to increase ability to pay attention, direct instruction of punctuation creation and placement (mini lessons with possible reteaching throughout the year), remedial handwriting curriculum instruction,  more exposure to higher level questions with guided modeling on how to answer them,  direct instruction of metacognitive reading strategies with instructor modelling  then individual practice.

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I worked with a 12 year old sixth grader. The child was reading at a W level in guided reading.
The students strengths were reading silently, reading words in context versus isolated words. The areas of growth are word identification in isolation, and summarization of the text as a whole. After working with this child and assessing their reading skills I came up with a plan to help the child improve their reading skills. This child would benefit from explicit instruction of comprehensive strategies. These strategies include activating the child’s prior knowledge. By assessing prior knowledge the child can relate to the story and get a better understand of what the text is trying to say. Another strategy that would benefit this child would be summarization. When reading paragraphs silently to the child’s self they seemed to be able to better understand what the paragraph was saying. By stopping at each paragraph and having the child summarize it, they were better able to comprehend the text as a whole. The final strategy that I think the child would benefit from is generating inferences. By generating inferences the child can create their own ideas on the text and what it is trying to say.

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Student: 7 yr old, female, 2nd grade, homeschooler

Strengths: word identification in isolation, reading comprehension (explicit questions), very positive reading attitude
Areas of Needed Growth: reading comprehension (implicit questions), retelling, spelling & mechanics
Recommendations: pre-teaching key vocabulary, building background knowledge, listen-read-discussion technique, assisted reading model to build fluency, compare-contrast approaches to phonics, stretch sounding & invented spelling

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I was having trouble posting this one with my other post...

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For my case study, I assessed a 6-year-old kindergartener. His independent level was prime 2 and his instructional/frustrational were primer 3. His strengths we're definitley writing. He was very capable of reading, but really lacked the interest. Writing, on the other hand, really kept him intrigued. One area where he could really grow was comprehension, which was the main thing that held him up from moving on to the next Primer. He lacked the interest to even go back and try and find the answers to the comprehension story. He would do it, but would put very little effort into it. The next major steps for this student would be to build up his interest and motivation in reading. I genuineley believe that if he had more interest that he could thrive in reading. Some things I suggested to help increase his interest we're using props like a magnifying glass and witch finger tops to help him locate look back questions and slow down when reading. This also puts a fun twist on it. One thing that I learned was how to administer a QRI. I found this very interesting, especially when being able to compare and contrast this with F & P- what I am use to working with as an employee of AACPS. It was interesting to learn about the similarities and differences, and how you can learn different things about the child from each one. Another thing I really took away from this case study was learning about how much you can find out about a child from a few simple tests. After administering just four simple tests, I was able to really identify the needs for this child. I think that this is something I am most definitley going to take into my classroom next year. If I have a student that is struggling, I can very easily assess them and see if I can pinpoint thier struggles through that. Lastly, I learned the importance of interest when it comes to reading. If the child is not interested, it can really hold them back. Which was seen throughout my case study. When they aren't interested this can be detrimental to thier reading progression. All in all, I learned so much from this case study and am so glad that I had the oppurtunity to do it. Thank you professor for a great semester, and I hope everyone had a wonderful snow day!!

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For my case study, I assessed a 7-year-old first grader. Her independent level was primer 2, her instructional level was a primer 3 and her frustration level was primer. Her strengths included comprehension and alphabet recognition. One area that I think needed growth was her ability to recognize sight words. She was good at sounding out the onset of a word and could understand and recognize verb tenses. She had a hard time with rhyming of words.  Something that I would recommend is stretching out the words. Another thing that would be helpful is putting sight words on an index card with pictures of the word. Something I learned was the abundance of information that you can get from testing with a QRI. Another thing I learned is there are a lot of sight words children are supposed to know and recognize.

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From the completion of this case study, I have learned many new things.

1) There are 2 types of readers whose levels the QRI word list scores will not predict accurately: readers who excel in using context over word identification in isolation and readers who struggle with reading comprehension despite excellent word identification capabilities (Leslie & Caldwell, 2011). The former reader’s skills will be underestimated while the latter’s will be overestimated.

2) Even though QRI tests do not use the retelling portion of passages to determine the independent, instructional, and frustration levels of a student, it can still provide teachers with useful data. In fact, it provides valuable information with implications for instruction (Leslie & Caldwell, 2011). For example, “if the student does not retell the central parts of a narrative, he or she may not have an understanding of story structure.”

3) After conducting a case study, I have gained first-hand experience with administering a variety of tests and assessments. I realized just how comprehensive they need to be in order for the information to benefit instruction. I also discovered that the individual needs of each student must be considered before starting tests such as the QRI or F&P because it can be a tiring and repetitive process. If the student gets bored and isn’t engaged, it can skew the results rendering the data ineffective.

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In my chart I have my students graded word list and reading passages data from January to March. You can see each level the child was at for each and the progress that they had made.

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Hello!