Brian Stevens

Assessment Notebook Summary

My student is Josette and she is in the fifth grade at Castlen Elementary. She has trouble

with reading, fluency, and comprehension skills and my teacher wanted me to work with her.

Overall, she was failing reading and wanted me to see what I could do. The first thing I did was

get to know her and have her get comfortable around me. She told me a lot about her family

life, including informing me that she has anger issues and she does not get to bed at a decent

time some nights. She likes to read mystery books, but does not read any at home. We went

through the library and she picked out a couple books of interest to her for future reading.

To find out what reading level Josette was on, I used the QRI assessment. On the word

lists for first, second, and third grades, she did well. She struggled with fourth grade so I

dropped back down to third. We read some stories and she was able to answer the questions at

the end for the most part. However, when asked about recalling and retelling events, they were

very sparse and scattered. She repeats herself a lot, including substituting words. She tries to

read fast and gets ahead of herself which contributes to these errors. She has told me she hates

reading and it shows because her focus and attention level is very low. I decided to focus on

fluency, and from there try to work on comprehension.

For intervention, I modeled expressive reading for her. Then I would have her read a few

pages back and forth. I echo read with her, and she had fun doing that at first, but gradually

would purposely stop reading with expression. We periodically would go over sight words for
first, second, and third grade and she could automatically identify majority of them. We also did

word phrases for first and second grade, and doing these repeatedly helped her some with

substituting and repeating words. After awhile she became agitated that we were doing some

of the intervention and sometimes just wouldn’t do the work.

She did make progress on fluency, and we would do some comprehension strategies like

making inferences, and recalling events. Other times we met, we read reading street story and

reviewed for the upcoming test. She could answer the questions correctly with me, but during

the test, in the classroom, she would fail the test. She has a hard time focusing on tasks with

other people in the room. So during their test, I would take her to the library and let her work

on the test without interference. She did better, but would still lose focus and just guess on

answers.

Towards the end of the semester, I was not able to meet with Josette as much as

I would have liked to, and the progress she had made in reading and attitude had reverted back

to not caring about school at all. It became hard to motivate her to want to improve. I did a

final QRI assessment the last time we met, and her fluency has definitely improved but her

comprehension skills and her ability to recall events was still lacking. Working with Josette, I

became a very patient person. I also learned that skills don’t improve overnight. I really feel

sympathetic towards her because she has potential to grow educationally, but she is not getting

the support she needs at home to succeed. I wish I had more time with her to bring her up to

speed, because middle school is going to be hard for her next year.