Helping a Student to Improve Grades and Test Scores

By creating a student case report, a teacher of reading can develop a holistic understanding of a child's reading development. The benefits of keeping a case report include having diagnostic, formative, and summative data on a student's reading progress combined with anecdotal and teacher observational data which provides contextual information on the student. Therefore, allowing the educator to make more informed instructional decisions regarding a reader as well as provide the most accurate and detailed information to parents and other stakeholders (such as special education professionals or educational psychologists) as needed. With a case report, such as an Informal Reading Inventory, the educator can build on a wealth of knowledge about the readers' holistic literacy (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary) in order to determine what the next steps will be for the reader.

The student I worked with is in 5th grade. We did a DRA on a story called “Cry Foul”. This is a great assessment to assess a student’s reading ability in order to enhance his or her literacy achievement. I learned many things about my student that he likes to read adventurous books and books regarding sports. He wants to become a better reader by enhancing his understanding and vocabulary of the text. It’s also a bit difficult for him since English is his second language and a year ago he was taking ESL classes. It’s amazing that he has great goal settings that determines that he wants to become a better reader. The things that I observed about the student is that his oral reading is fluent since he had about three miscues in which one was

Setting: I observed this fourth grade student during his English Language Arts block for 45 minutes. The class consists of 22 fourth grade students in a student-centered classroom. During my observation, the students collaborated with other students while the teacher conducted a guided reading group. Students were on computers, writing and reading to respond in a journal. Three days a week this students is pulled out of the classroom for a 30 minute Fountas and Pinell Literacy Intervention due to the Tier 3 instructional level.

What are your instructional goals to promote growth for this student as a reader and interpreter of text in a variety of media? My

I think a teacher and even counselor can benefit from knowing the student in question really well. Along with their history in prior classes, was this an issue with the last teacher? did the student enjoy reading at any point before? Was the students always a good reader but now the material is harded? Do they have a new IEP? Are they not challenge and bored? These are all questions to think about with reluctant learners. I am working with a student now in my counseling internship along with mu supervisor who is the school counselor. The student was in gifted last year, in 4th grade, but now is refusing to do any work. He can definently do the work but does not want too. We discovered he does not like working in groups with other students but in this 5th grade class a great amount of group work takes place. Teachers can use several interventions to help with relucant students such as picking interesting topics, allowing the student to make suggestions about what they want to read, and exploring motivation. Once students can recieve something they want, maybe a prize or a homework pass, they will be motivate to complete task they do not want to. The text also speaks about making more complex reading avaliable so they reader will be challenged, if the work being to easy was the issue. It may or may not be effective depending on the type of

Based on my observations of the assessments, K.M lacks proper fluency and comprehension skills. In addition, based upon her continuous pausing while reading, I can indicate there is a speech area of concern. K.M. battles with making the accurate connections needed to produce reading comprehension. She often appears lost and completely off topic. Although K.M. displays vocabulary understanding, there is a misinterpretation of linking the vocabulary meaning to the actually passage/text being read aloud. Furthermore, K.M. when uncertain about an answer tends to guess a whole heap. The fluency levels show a slight growth, however it is not a huge jump. K.M. assessment indicates she is reading below grade level (2nd grade) and needs intervention

Reviewing all of the word families and all the phonics rules (cvc, cvce, r-controlled, ect) would help the student’s fluency even more because it would help with his reading and recognition of unknown words. Also future tutoring sessions could involve Readers Theater or echo reading of poems and short stories to foster the student’s prosody. Once the child becomes a more fluent reader he can then start to comprehend the stories he is reading. What we were doing with the student was helping, so I believe if he completed more tutoring sessions like this he would master reading fluency. Furthermore, this was also a learning experience for me. I got to see some of the literacy struggles we talked about in class first hand and I used what I learned to support the child in his learning. It is one thing learning about what to do, but it is a whole new aspect when having to apply it to a real life situation. Because of this experience I feel more confident teaching literacy, and I also gained experience working one-on-one with a child. If I had the opportunity, I would do this all over

I am basing this assignment on a female student named Suzy. She is in the 5th grade and is an avid reader. Suzy enjoys reading independently reading fiction books on her grade level and sometimes beyond. She has shown that she can comprehend the text and how the text works. She is capable of making predictions and understands that the text is something that influences people’s ideas. When she is not reading, Suzy enjoys spending time writing her own stories. In her writings, she uses vocabulary she has learned from the books. Suzy’s struggle is with reading non-fiction text. She does not enjoy non-fiction and often skims through the pages or passages. This creates a comprehension barrier and results in poor performance on assessments.

Austin is 12 year old 7th grader. He is diagnosed with ADHD & PDD-NO. He is a hardworking and likeable student. He is in a co-taught reading and language arts and the rest of his classes are general education classes. He has a reading comprehension goal. The strategy selected was Directed Reading Activity. The strategy was selected because Austin struggles with reading informational text and pulling out the important pieces. The strategy also has a large focus on readiness, which is good for Austin because he tends to make rash and impulsive decisions. The strategy would then slow him down, have him think ahead of time about his background knowledge, will peak his interest, introduce new vocabulary, and establish a purpose for reading (Vaughn

Evidently, we all have a moral — and indeed legal — duty to help our students become proficient readers and writers. This, of course, is easier said than done.

Over the course of the tutoring sessions, I focused on developing Elyse’s comprehension when answering inference questions, understanding vocabulary in the context of the text, and answering fact-based questions. My main goal was to help Elyse retain what she is reading in order to answer comprehension questions. Throughout the tutoring sessions, we read Walk Two Moons, a fiction novel by Sharon Creech. We started each session by talking about what we read the session before and what she read at home. Then I would introduce a skill that I wanted her to focus on while she was reading. Next, Elyse would read two to three chapters aloud. While she was reading, she would write down any vocabulary words that she came across and felt that she did not understand. When she was done reading we would go over the vocabulary words that she has picked out. We would reread the sentence and try to figure out what the word meant. Then we would go over any vocabulary words that I had picked out for her to define. We would always finish each session with comprehension questions and sometimes a writing prompt.

These texts clearly show that the high achieving students will not be fine on their own. All the research indicates high achieving students from lower-income families decrease throughout their educational career. Helping students that are high achieving not only helps the students but would also contribute to closing the achievement gap between lower-income and high-income family students.

This article is shows different strategies that a principal can use to help raise test scores in schools. The strategies mentioned have been used by principals in the past and, therefore, have been successful for schools. The authors mention six different strategies that can be helpful and certainly fall along the lines of best practice. The strategies involved are analyzing test data, parents support score-raising efforts, constant monitoring of progress, looking at student work helps improve teaching, practice tests all year, and good teaching is good teaching.

Many students around the United States have reading difficulties, which can be due to a variety of reason such as: low socioeconomic status, family history of learning disabilities, a neurological disorder, limited exposure, etc. Reading difficulties can lead to further problems with education and learning, therefore the struggles should be addressed and intervention techniques should be implemented promptly. The interventions need to be individualized for the student based on their needs in order to improve the student’s reading to the best of their abilities.

I met the instructor before class to discuss overall goals as well as goals for that day’s lesson. The overall goal of the course is to improve reading comprehension skills, increase math problem solving skills, and develop a strong ability to combine the two and further discussion skills. The goal of that day’s lesson was to work on reading strategies: scanning, identifying main ideas, and understanding details of different math word problems and equations. The instructor mentioned that there are only 10 people in the class and almost all of them are between the ages of 11-12. They are all at pretty much the same reading level, although there is some slight variation. Specifically though, in her fourth period class, one student had a tremendous difficulty in reading and understanding word problems and them translating those words into numbers and equations.