Kimberly Isidori - App State



Kimberly Isidori

Dr. Morris

Final Case Study

Isaiah is a very typical 3rd grade boy. He likes wrestling and football and riding dirt bikes. It was a bit rough working with Isaiah in the beginning as he always likes to be in control of a situation. He was very reluctant to read and even more reluctant to write. Once we got him into books that he really enjoyed and divided the reading by partner reading, he became a lot more willing to do the work. Isaiah can be really funny and has a great imagination if you get him going. He can tell you a great, in depth story with lots of detail, but does not like to transfer that story to paper.

Upon initial testing, it was determined that Isaiah’s instructional level was late 1st grade. This was due to his 96% oral reading accuracy score and his score of 60% on the word flash. His reading rate of 78 wpm was in the range for 1st grade oral reading. His frustration level was 2nd grade. He scored only 86% on oral reading accuracy as he made 17 errors, with 14 being meaning change errors. Also, his oral reading rate was only 69 wpm which is below the range for 2nd grade and his comprehension score was only 60%. All of this led to the conclusion that instructional level was late-first grade and 2nd grade was his frustrational level. Also revealed in the initial testing was the fact that he needed some work on non-rhyming short vowel patterns,

r-controlled words, and long a/e words, with a focus on words with blends.

Over the 12 weeks of instruction, Isaiah has been making progress in guided reading. He began at the 1-2 level and ended reading books at the late 2nd level. Some of the first books he read were Henry and Mudge Take the Big Test and Robber in the Woods. He then progressed to books at the late 2nd grade level including, Pirate’s Promise and Sitting Bull, both of which he enjoyed. A very important part of selecting books for Isaiah is the topic. He really likes books that deal with fighting and guns and would not choose to read any book that did not contain it in some form. Due to Isaiah’s negative response to reading, I had to make some adaptations to his program. First, I always begin reading the first couple pages or the first chapter if it is a new book. He needs this in order to become engaged with the story and will refuse to read first. Also, when reading with Isaiah, we always partner read. Isaiah does not like to read even a whole page of text, and will only participate if we alternate. Even with partner reading, Isaiah likes to try to bargain or get out of doing some of the reading. The parts have to be exactly even or he will try to go through and measure to make sure his part is not longer. I found that if I go through and mark the pages or paragraphs ahead of time with each of our initials, this helps and he is more likely to read his part without argument. Isaiah reads better when he finger-tracks or uses a card to follow along so that he doesn’t lose his place. Generally, he does fairly well with figuring out new words and will usually ask me what a word means if he doesn’t know. His comprehension is good when the questions come from the text and he is also good at making predictions about what will happen next. While not always correct, the predictions make sense and could logically happen. I also had him read silently each time we read since he struggles with this a bit. As long as the section was short he would usually complete it without argument and could answer questions about it when finished.

Across the 12 weeks, Isaiah has worked through the vowels a, i, o, and u with short vowel non-rhyming words, r-controlled, and e marker words for each vowel. Blends and digraphs were included in each pattern. The “I” words seem to have been the most difficult for him and required the most attention. He usually does really well with the words and can sort them with just a few missed words. During quick flashes of the words (to see if we should move on to the next vowel) he got almost all of them and could read the ones missed when he had a few extra seconds to look at them. He loves playing the games and usually has very few errors. After finishing with “u” words, I did an overall check which included 63 words from all five vowels. I flashed the words to him and he got through all 63 words in 1 minute and 23 seconds and only missed 7 words. We then decided to go back and work with the “o” words again but focused on the patterns oo, oi, and old. This proved to be much more difficult for him and he really struggled with distinguishing between oo words like good and moon as he simply didn’t hear the difference very easily. This is where we were working at the end of the semester.

For fluency, repeated readings were completed, but they were not started until mid February. Overall, he did excellent with these and his reading rate has definitely gone up since his pre-test IRI. On that he got 78 wpm for 1st grade and 69 words per minute at 2nd grade. On all of the repeated readings he starts at around 200 words in 2 minutes on the first read and ends the fourth read between 245 and 269 wpm. This means that even during his first read he is reading at least 100 words a minute. This is a great improvement and shows that he has made progress throughout the tutoring sessions.

Writing is the area in which we have seen the least amount of improvement. Isaiah hates writing and almost always puts up a struggle when we get to this part of the lesson. Although his handwriting is very messy and he writes with little to no punctuation, he can always read back what he wrote. Isaiah’s first writing topic was football. They made a story web and he wrote four basic sentences that told about football, but had no story aspect. His next story, which he worked on for a few weeks, was about dirt bikes and this was actually a great story and flowed with a beginning, middle, and end. After this, his writing regressed. He tried to write about wrestling but could only come up with a list of facts, so we abandoned that and moved on to pirates. He started writing a great story but then got stuck and refused help on where to go from there. Much time was wasted with Isaiah just sitting there saying he didn’t know what to write and so we decided to forgo writing in order to focus on other areas where he would make more progress. This was really unfortunate because Isaiah has a great imagination and would tell me a great story, but would not put it down on paper.

Isaiah’s post test results are very promising and accurately reveal the progress he has made over the past 12 weeks. The post-test shows that Isaiah is now instructional at the late 2nd to early 3rd grade level and frustrational at 4th grade. His oral reading scores were 95% and 94% at second and third grade respectively which is up from 86% at 2nd and no score at 3rd grade on the pre-test. His word flash scores were 95% and 45% at second and third grade. These are both improvements from the pre-test IRI. Also, his rate at 1st and 2nd grade is now 94 wpm and 92 wpm at 3rd grade. This is significantly higher than his scores of 78 wpm, 69 wpm, and then no score at the first, second, and third grade respectively on the pre-test. His comprehension was 100% on all of these passages. His frustration level is 4th grade because while he scored a border line score of 92% oral reading accuracy, his rate dropped dramatically to only 60 wpm at this level. This is a crippling rate and he would struggle to work at this level which is evident by his 13 errors on the reading passage (9 were meaning errors).

The results from the post-test do show the progress that Isaiah has made over the 12 weeks in which he went from a late 1st grade reader to a late 2nd/early 3rd grade reader. While he is still behind as he is now at the end of third grade, he made considerable gains in oral reading accuracy, sight vocabulary, and oral reading rate. All of this should help him to become a more fluent reader and continue to make growth in his reading abilities.

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