QUALITATIVE READING INVENTORY SUMMARY

For the qualitative reading inventory, I chose a second-grade student who receives first-

grade reading instruction in a learning support classroom. Her IEP states she has a learning

disability in reading and math. Ruth struggles with reading but is ready to learn and willing to

participate. She hesitates when giving answers or reading because of a fear of being wrong.

After administering the inventories and learning more about Ruth as a reader and child, I

administered the word lists to test the students word recognition. She scored 100% on the pre-

primer 1 word list. She automatically identified fifteen of the words with hesitations only on the

words “the” and “she”. On the pre-primer 2/3 list she automatically identified nine words,

identified six words, and incorrectly identified five words. She hesitated on a few of the words

due to her fear of answering incorrectly. For the few words she answered incorrectly, she gave

quick answers. She did not attempt to decode, but automatically gave a different word as an

answer. This word list was at the instructional level for Ruth. The primer and first grade word

lists were also instructional level. She missed five words from each list but automatically

identified a majority of the words. There were a few words she hesitated to answer, but still

correctly identified them. The second-grade word list was at the frustration level for Ruth. She

automatically identified six of the words and identified seven words. The student wanted to

continue trying to read the words but could only identify four words on the third-grade list.

After calculating Ruth’s scores on the word list, I determined that Ruth could read at the

primer or first-grade level. I originally administered a narrative first-grade passage, but the

student struggled and read few words correctly. I chose two primer passages to administer

instead. The narrative passage was called, “The Pig Who Learned to Read” and the expository

passage was called, “Who Lives Near Lakes?” Ruth had a total of twenty-two miscues on the
narrative passage and seven miscues on the expository reading. At some parts of the narrative

reading, she was able to read with expression. She was unable to read the character’s name

correctly either time “Pete” appeared in the text. Anytime there was a contraction, she would

break the word apart to read instead of saying the contraction. For example, the text read “don’t”

and the student said “do not” ignoring the apostrophe. She self-corrected a few instances after

reading the sentence and hearing that it did not make sense. After calculating these miscues, I

found the students accuracy during reading was at the frustration level. The student was only

able to retell the background of the story and the main goal of the main character. The only other

event she could retell was the boy reading to the pig. Her retell of the story did not provide

enough events to make sense of the story. She answered five out of six comprehension questions

correctly, both explicit and implicit.

In the expository reading, she had significantly fewer miscues, but the passage was much

shorter. Out of these seven miscues, four changed the meaning of the text. Like the narrative

scores, this passage led to the results of the student being at the frustration level. She read with

expression towards the end of the text where she had no miscues. Once again, she was only able

to give two events during the retell assessment. Ruth scored five out of six comprehension

questions. Her comprehension skills are strong even though her fluency and retell are weak.

After administering these assessments, I concluded that Ruth needs instruction and extra

attention in the areas of reading fluency and retell. Her comprehension skills are strong, but I

believe she has the ability to correctly answer all of the questions if her fluency skills increased.