Assessment Assignment

READ 620
Sara Peters
Longwood University
September 15, 2015

Class Overview
The class that I assessed was a Third Grade class. It contained 18 students. The
ability range for this class extended from Late Letter Name to Middle Derivational
Relations. This wide range of abilities led to the creation of three distinct Word Study
groups to best fit the needs of all learners in my class.
Within Word Instructional Group
This instructional group contains seven children who range from the Late Letter
Name stage to the Late Within Word stage. Most of the students fall in the Middle to Late
Within Word stage, with my Late Letter Name students becoming my outliers. According
to the synchrony of literacy development, my Within Word students should fall into the
Transitional Level of Reading/Writing and my Letter Name students should fall in the
Beginning Level of Reading/Writing. The students I placed in this group were Anna,
Kaylee, Steven, Bridget, Sam, Caleb, and Trevor B. I chose to group these students
together because they all fell within a similar range of Middle to Late Within Word, with
the exception of Caleb and Trevor B, who are my outliers. I chose to group my Late
Letter Name student with my Middle to Late Within Word students because both of those
students are only missing one digraph and then have a solid foundation until they reach
the Middle Within Word Stage. For Caleb, he keeps replacing the /sh/ digraph with the
consonant sound, /s/. Trevor makes a similar error, except he replaces the digraph, /ch/,
with the consonant sound, /g/. To help these two students be successful in this group, I
will focus on digraphs with them in addition to the long vowel words that they will see
with the rest of the group. This means that I will choose sort words that contain both long
vowels and digraphs so that both subgroups of students may have practice with what they

need. Caleb and Trevor B. will then be able to sort words based on Long Vowels and by
their digraphs regardless of vowels.
Currently at the beginning of the year my students are successful in some areas
and need to improve in others. At this time my students have clearly mastered Beginning
and Ending consonant sounds, short vowels, blends, and for the most part, digraphs. My
more advanced students in the group have mastered nearly all of their digraphs and
blends. As a group my students also use but confuse the Long Vowels, specifically long
o, through the feature oa. They also mistakenly use the long a in the ai and a-e
features. Some also misuse the igh feature. For almost all of these features the students
in Within Word are using features that function the same as the appropriate feature but are
used in the wrong place. Yet they also still have some work to do with the features that
are absent. My Late Letter Name students are absent in different areas; one is starting to
be absent in features beginning with Unaccented Final Syllables and the other starts to be
absent in Long Vowels. The Middle Within Word students start to become absent in their
features at Unaccented Final Syllables and Harder Suffixes. The Late Within Word
students also start to be absent in various features. One student is absent in the Inflected
Endings feature. The second student becomes absent in Harder Suffixes, along with the
third student. With all of this progress, it is important for me to keep the end goal in mind
for this group. Therefore, by the end of the year I want this group of learners to be
working on Early Syllables and Affixes Stage. This is because the Within Word stage is a
very dense stage and can be very complex when navigating vowel patterns. So it could
take a whole year to finish out the Within Word stage to where they have a solid
foundation and are able to focus entirely on the Inflected Endings feature that starts the

Syllables and Affixes stage. This should follow an average pace of instruction so as to
keep the range of learners all moving in a forward direction and working with the same
feature, yet different words. To make sure this goal is met, I will provide support to my
ELs and my struggling learners. This support will include providing more attention to the
struggling learners in the group and giving them words that follow the digraphs that the
Late Letter Name learners start with. I will also provide struggling learners with words
that follow the same feature but also work with a single syllables, blends, or other
features that these students struggle with so as to further differentiate for the group. For
my Late Letter Name students, it may require intervention to help them reach this goal. I
will provide instruction that focuses more on the features that they struggle with so as to
help those students catch up to their Within Word peers.
At this point in the year, I am working to lay the foundation for the end of the year
goal. To start off instruction I will use sort number twenty-five which focuses on the
Long a vowel pattern. This pattern was chosen because it addresses the long vowel that is
most commonly missed by all students in the group. It also contains digraphs, which
attends to the Late Letter Name students.
Syllables & Affixes Group
This instructional group has six students in it. These students range from Early to
Late Syllables and Affixes stage. These students are fairly equally dispersed between the
Early (3 students), Middle (1 student), and Late (2 students). Due to this spread of
students, I did not find any outliers for the group as a whole. In this group I placed
Natalie, Dana, Lindsay, Brian, Molly, and Lexi in this group. The students who fall into
the Early and Middle Syllables and Affixes stage should be in the Intermediate Stage of

Reading and Writing Development. The students who are categorized as Late Syllables
and Affixes should correspond to the end of Intermediate and the start of the Advanced
levels of Reading and Writing Development. Even with these students in a wide range of
abilities, I grouped them together because the students all had equally strong marks
across the stage. For example, even though Brian and Molly were found to be
instructional in the Early Syllables and Affixes stage, they had strong results
comparatively to their peers who were found in the Middle and Late stages. Even with
the variance of abilities there are still solid skills that the group has as a whole. For
instance, as a group, they did well with the Syllable Juncture feature, particularly with the
doubling of consonants in the middle of words. The only student who found this
particularly troubling was Molly, who missed the p in ripen(PP: p) and the tt in
bottle (T: tt; D: tt), which was a feature that she used but confused. As a group, there
were a few features they used but confused, such as the -ies in the word carries.
Many students used -ys instead of the proper ending. Because of this, the plurals with
y is where I chose to start instruction. In addition to what these students use but
confuse they also have a few things that are absent. For example, all of my students
missed the -ar ending in the word cellar and most misunderstood the meaning of the
word and exchanged seller for cellar. Additionally, they are all fairly absent in the
-ure feature found in the word pleasure, as nearly all of the students missed it. This
analysis has led to the goals for the end of the year.
At the end of the year, I want this group to have a good foundation within the
Harder Suffixes feature of the Derivational Relations Stage. This will be met with
average paced instruction and with a heavy focus on correcting errors caused by holes in

instruction. I will work with my early stage students to make sure they have a solid
understanding of inflected endings and how to apply those features to words with
Syllable Juncture or Unaccented Final Syllables, which will require me to provide
additional support to these students. This will help them see through direct instruction,
how all of the features of the Syllables and Affixes stage work together. This instruction
will also benefit the rest of the students in the group.
To start working on the goal for the end of the year I will start instruction with
sort sixty-six from Words Their Way, which focuses on plural words that end in y. I
chose this sort because this was a feature that all of my students used but confused in
terms of mistaking when to use the ending -ys and when to use -ies. I will also use
words that contain double consonants to help support the rest of the students who are not
in the Middle Stage of Syllables and Affixes but still mistake when to double consonants
in syllables. By focusing on this feature as a whole group first, it should most benefit the
group and start them off with a solid foundation for the end of year goal.
Derivational Relations Group
In my final instructional group I have five students which range from the Early to
Middle and beyond areas of the Derivational Relations stage of spelling. According to the
synchrony of literacy development, my students in this group should all be working in the
Advanced Stage of Reading and Writing Development. Of my students I placed, Miguel,
Trevor H., Edwin, Callie, and Ben within this group. From this group, three are in the
early level of the stage, two are in the middle level, and I have one outlier. Miguel is my
outlier because he does not yet seem instructional on this spelling inventory. If I were to
actually test him, I would continue with the Upper Spelling Inventory. For this purpose of

this assignment, I have placed him as instructional for Middle Derivational Relations. I
placed Miguel within this group because it would not be as positive of a learning
environment to group him by himself. This would limit his exposure to other students
thinking and the social interaction that is fostered through this program. To help
accommodate Miguel, I will have him work with the same feature as the rest of the
group, but use more challenging words to help him expand his vocabulary. Despite the
outlier, I grouped these students together because of their similar standings with the two
main features in this stage. All students missed at least one feature from each of the
categories. This showed me that the students were closely tied, especially given their
similar errors, despite the difference in stages.
These students have a variety of ability and yet they have certain commonalities
within the group. For example, all students have strong scores coming from the late
Syllables and Affixes stage and all made good work of the tion ending, with the
exception of one student. There are also several features that students use but confuse.
One feature that causes students trouble is the ure in the word pleasure. Many students
end up using a form of er or her because of the sounds they hear at the end of the word.
Additionally, they also confuse ate with at or et, because of the strong final /t/. Along
with features that students use but confuse, there are also several that are absent. One
feature that is absent for almost all of these students is the civil- root in the word
civilize. Students are missing this feature and reverting back to the phonetic spelling of
it, which shows they do not yet have a foundation of how other languages have impacted
English. Another feature that is absent for most of those students is the confid- root in
confidence. This feature causes trouble because of the /e/ where there is an i, which

some dialects can be responsible for. After analyzing the features that students are strong
with and those with which they struggle, I determined my end of year goal.
For the end of the year, my goal is to get my students to a mastery of Harder
Suffixes and an 85% accuracy of Bases or Roots. This will require average to fast pacing
because of the complexity of the bases and roots instruction. This should not require any
exceptional interventions because of the close grouping of my students. I want my
students to have an 85% accuracy in Bases and Roots so that they will better understand
the meanings behind words which will better help with their comprehension in the
coming years. To start off instruction, however, I will use sort ninety-five, involving
Words with ure and er. I chose this sort to start instruction because of the number of
students who missed the ure suffix in the spelling inventory. I believe this will be a good
place to start before working with other suffixes. Due to the high error rate of these
features for Early and Middle Derivational Relations students, I believe using this feature
will benefit all students in the groups. It will provide appropriate instruction for the Early
Level students and a good review for the students who are working in the Middle or
beyond levels of Derivational Relations.
In addition to providing extra support to the students who at the Early level of
stages or have fallen behind, I will also work to accommodate my advanced learners. To
do this, I will provide them words that are more challenging, but still involve the same
features. This will allow them to be challenged but not frustrated. Also I will have my
higher students look for commonalities between types of features to come up with rules
for why we use a feature in a certain setting. I think this will help my advanced learners

stay engaged and interesting in learning about the words they use and increase their
vocabulary.