Assessment Experience Results and Report 1

Assessment Experience Results and Report

Julio Perez
EDRL 443-1001
October 26, 2019
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Assessment Experience Results and Report

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working with my student, Sidney, on a variety

of literacy activities. Sidney is a fourth-grade student with a high interest in superheroes. We

have been exploring a variety of books as well as writing in order to build up and make our

nonfiction picture book. In the tutoring sessions I have also administered many different

assessments to measure all of Sidney’s literacy skills, and to know how to best support him in

our tutoring sessions. The results of these assessments have helped me select new and interesting

literature for him to read as well as find strategies and games that will strengthen his literacy

skills.

One of the very first assessments I conducted was the Elementary Spelling Inventory

(ESI). According to the book Words Their Way by Donald R. Bear, Marcia Invernizzi, Shane

Templeton, and Francine Johnston spelling inventories are used to measure what students know

about words (2016). Spelling inventories, according to text are a quick, reliable, and valid

method of measuring student’s knowledge about words (Bear et. al, 2016). These spelling

inventories, based on the results the students provide, help a teacher determine in which spelling

stage a student is in and is detailed enough to help instructors pinpoint areas of strength and areas

students need more help or work in.

So for the assessment there are twenty-five words but in the case with Sidney my

instructor and I decided it was best for us to stop at fifteen words, because by then my student

was showing signs of frustration and he had given me enough data to analyze. Through careful

analysis I determined Sidney’s Spelling level to be in between Early and Middle Letter Name-

Alphabetic. Sidney was able to correctly spell out all the initial and final consonant letters in the

words. When it comes to the short vowels sounds in the words Sidney was able to get two out
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five correct, and with digraphs he spelled three out of six correct. When it came to blends Sidney

was able to identify and spell four out of seven correct, but he was not able to identify and spell

any of the common long vowels. The biggest factor that helped me determine his spelling stage

was that he was unable to identify and spell all of the short vowels correctly. Although he was

able to identify some Digraphs, and blends, I believed it was best to work on having him master

short vowel sounds and spelling first, hence my placement of him in the early to middle letter

name-alphabetic spelling stage.

The book Words their Way makes suggestions as to what kinds of word study I could

employ with the results achieved in the ESI. I found and believe Sound sorts would be best for

Sidney. This word study activity has me presenting cards with pictures that use words with the

specific word features I want to focus on studying, short vowel words like cat for example. My

student would need to look at the picture and identify what the picture is, then we could sort it

based on whatever word feature we are working on. The picture makes the activity much more

relaxed and friendly for undiscovered readers as there is now words, but you still have students

thinking and identifying the words features you want them to identify.

I think overall this is a very fair and valid assessment, and for me it has given me

invaluable insight as to where Sidney is in his literacy development. What I really like about this

is that as the instructor you have that flexibility to cut it off when you deem appropriate. For

example in the case of my tutee, Sidney, by the fifteenth word he was getting frustrated and I had

already collected enough data for my analysis, so I cut the assessment short.

The next assessment I conducted with my tutee Sidney was the Leveled Sentences

Passages. According to the book Literacy for the 21st Century A Balanced Approach by Gail E.

Tompkins leveled passages along with running records are to monitor a student’s “ability to
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recognize high frequency-words, decode unfamiliar words, and use reading strategies” as well as

to determine their reading level (2017). The assessment in our case consisted from carefully

selected passages from many books students will likely encounter in books at school. Each

passage was a different Lexile level and we used three comprehension questions and running

records to analyze the student’s reading abilities.

To begin, I started off with the passage that was Level two with a lexile of 540. Sidney

struggled significantly to read through the passage, and further analysis of running record for this

passage showed he was certainly in the frustrational level of reading for this passage. He scored

a 79.6% overall and surprisingly was able to answer all the comprehension questions correctly.

When looking at his mistakes in this passage his skipped over some of the words, he needed a lot

of teacher assist for nouns or names in the story. For words he misread after careful analysis it

seemed to be a lot of visual cues. For example he confused “Lucy” with “Lucky” or “live” with

“love” which I thought was quite understandable they are very similar words. Other mistakes did

leave me a little confused as well like him reading “spent” instead of “sleepover”, my guess is

because both words begin an “s”. As a result, I moved to the second Level one passage with a

Lexile of 260, this time Sidney performed much better. He scored a score of 88.6%, but I firmly

believe this is his instructional level and not another frustrational level. Teacher assists once

again centered around the nouns in the passage and once again ,although to a lesser frequency,

Sidney had mistakes related to visual cues like “wild” with “would” and that is why I believe this

is Sidney’s instructional level.

Tompkins suggest the usage of running records to continually analyze a student’s reading

abilities and identify the areas of strength and areas to work on. I firmly believe that in my case

this is strongly correlated to the ESI results. Sidney is having a difficult time reading because he
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is unable to decode a significant amount of letter sounds, so if work is done to improve his skills

in decoding letter sounds and letter combination sounds his reading ability will improve

significantly. Running records like the ESI will help me identify areas where I can conduct word

studies with Sidney. I am able to analyze mistakes and determine why the student read the word

wrong using the different cue systems, which help me further pinpoint what needs to be worked

on.

Finally, the last thing I conducted was an analysis of Sidney’s writing. There was no

specific assessment used for this assessment instead I used the Writing Continuum to analyze

writing sample from Sidney. The Writing Continuum is a checklist where we as the teacher is

able to analyze a student’s writing based on the different features present. It is my belief, based

on writing samples from Sidney that he is in the Developing stage of writing based on the

features I looked at in his writing samples. Sidney exceeds in using spaces between words, and

his writing order. I believe he is meeting standards in terms of using punctuation and using letter

sounds to spell words. Other than that he is approaching standards in the remaining categories.

His sentences are not fully constructed and sometimes do not make sense and he is interchanging

lowercase and uppercase letters occasionally.

In chapter six of Tompkins book, it is highlighted that reluctant readers are most likely

reluctant writers as well and the literacy skills have plenty of overlap (2016). Tompkins suggest

that in order to increase writing fluency it is important to also increase reading fluency and so

that means engaging the student in more reading and writing activities concurrently. I once again

firmly believe this heavily ties in to the first assessment, the ESI. If I work with Sidney and get

him to begin to identify more common parts of words his reading and writing will improve

dramatically, the key lies in him learning to identify all the letter sounds and combinations.
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Tompkins also suggest modeling how to write and read for these students which I believe I have

not been doing enough of in this case.

There is a lot of work to be done with Sidney, but I am confident I can do a lot to

improve his reading and writing abilities, or at least push him slightly closer to being a much

better reader and writer.

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Resources
Bear, D. R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. R. (2019). Words their way: word
study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction. Upper Saddle River: Pearson
Education, Inc.
Tompkins, G. E., Smith, C., Campbell, R., & Green, D. (2019). Literacy for the 21st century: a
balanced approach. Pearson Education .
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