Internship Assignment:

Assessment of WRI, Word Sort, and DR-TA

Meredith A. Macon

     When choosing the student for this assessment, I took into consideration the individual’s attitude towards school and learning.  Adam is in my reading group that is made up of the higher level kids in the class.  He is one of the slower readers in the group, but the teacher put him in the group because “he tries so hard,” and I like that.  He is a bright kid that is an all round good student that is enthused about school.  Usually, when I am doing an activity like this it is during something else and I did not want a student that would be distracted with what they were missing.  I knew that Adam would be a willing participant.

    First, I administered a Word Recognition Inventory.  In the pre-primer level he mistook “thing” for “get” in the flash and but during the untimed he self corrected.  I see this as a careless mistake that resulted a 95% flash and 100% untimed.  In the premier level he made no mistakes and the same for first grade. In the second grade he scored 95% timed and 100% untimed. On the third grade list he misread “plop” in both flashed and untimed, but self corrected his lack of response for “further”.  This resulted in the score of 90% flash and 95% untimed.  This shows that Adam is very independent in his own grade level.  For the fourth grade level words Adam scored 80% flash and 90% untimed.  He was able to self-correct the words, “furnace” and “miracle” but it took him quite some time to sound these words out.  This puts Adam at a fourth grade instructional, almost independent, level, which is a grade above his own.  Adam is an above average reader for third graders.  What is quite interesting is in the fifth and sixth grade lists Adam scored a 55% flash and a 90% untimed.  Adam does not have these words in his immediate vocabulary but has lots of exposure to words and knows how to sound them out correctly.  I feel that this shows how fast Adam is improving his reading ability and word knowledge.  All during the WRI he was enjoying the “game” and was very curious, about what I was writing, and whether he was getting the words right.  I continue to encourage and positively reinforce by telling him what a good job he is doing with these hard words because he is getting slower.  It was during the seventh grade list that he began to get frustrated.  He scored a 35% flash and 75% untimed.  “You’re doing a great job!  Let’s keep going.”  I said, because he was trying to get off task, starting to tell me a story.  For the level eight words he was trying very hard and wanted to know what the words were if he saw me write notes.  Overall, I think that Adam’s instructional level would be at a solid fourth grade but with a bit more reading experience he could easily progress through the fifth grade level.  I did not continue with word sort directly after the WRI, I felt that he needed a break and I really did not want him to miss PE.  After PE I took Adam out in the hall again to administer the word sort and play concentration.  The words used were from a previous spelling word list.  They dealt with the long “A” sound in “paid,” “maybe,” and “lake.”  Adam had very little trouble sorting the words and did it very quickly.  Actually “maybe” confused him, but after he physically put the card under the wrong list he realized it and quickly moved it under the correct list.  While we were sorting the list I asked what sound all the words had in common he said “A,” which was correct but I wanted to be a bit more specific so I questioned, “Long or short?” Quickly he replied with “long.”  Then, I asked why again, and he told me because of the “i,” “y,” and “e” that are silent.  When we finished the sort we played concentration.  He beat me twice, I let him win once, but I was really trying on the second.  This shows that Adam had no problem with them words and that it he needed more of a challenge in his spelling lists.  I followed this activity with a chocolate, caramel rice crispy treat as a big thank you for his participation.

    The next day in reading we did a DR-TA with a short story about a kid and his family in Mexico.  They whole group did not really seem excited about reading it at all.  They would have rather been doing what the rest of the class was doing and were easily distracted by other people in the hall.  In the beginning, during the predicting, they were saying silly things that were very unrelated to the topic.  We decided that we were going to “popcorn” read aloud with the whole group.  Adam is one of the slowest readers in the group but he does not carelessly miss or add words, like some of the other faster readers.  This tells me that he is a very careful reader because if it does not make sense he will read it over.  Also, popcorn reading is when the students choose who reads next, and they always had everybody read once before starting the cycle over.  I do not know if it was part of their routine but I found that great that they always included everybody in the reading.  Overall, I think that the DR-TA went ok after it got started but the whole predicting part throughout the lesson was filled with silly unrelated stuff and it was hard to keep them on task.  I think that this would have been more effective if I had picked a topic that they would have found a bit more interesting and related to themselves.