Alisha Tricarico Running Record The Running Record assessment is administered to children in schools in an effort to help teachers gain

a better understanding of their students reading behaviors. With this, teachers can assign students to their appropriate reading level and inform instruction based on their needs. Running records help teachers become aware of student fluency when reading aloud. The test is designed to have students read an unknown text aloud to the administrator, and during this time their proficiency is being recorded. There are different codes that represent the types of miscues that may occur. Some miscues include; self-correction, substitution, refusal to pronounce total word, insertion, omission, repetition, reversal, and appeal for help. As the child reads the teacher has their own copy of the text and these codes are placed on the words accordingly. I am placed in a kindergarten classroom at Cambridge Elementary in South Brunskwick NJ. There are 20 students in this classroom, and the layout of the room consists of 4 tables with five students seated at each table. This allows for socialization and group work, which is critical at this age. Students are constantly engaging in conversation and play throughout the day. It is a very diverse classroom both academically and culturally. This is an inclusive classroom, but since these students are at such a young age, none have been given an IEP yet. However, three students are being referred for testing and pulled out of class each morning during handwriting. I am not informed as to what these students are working on outside of the classroom, but I am aware that they are being pulled into the resource room. The student that I performed the running record assessment on is Sahana. She is 6 years old, and is a very bright student who is always engaged with her peers and has motivation to read. During DEAR time, she is constantly trying to challenge herself and selects higher-level texts. Since she is reading in her head, I was curious to see how fluent she was with her reading;

along with gaining information on the types of miscues she has. Sahana is placed in the highestlevel group within this kindergarten class. Mrs. Walker says that Sahana reads at a 1st grade level. I decided to put all bias aside and assess her myself. I assessed Sahana while the students were working on writing pieces. Mrs. Walker gave students about 30 minutes to continue working on their all about me books. I took Sahana to a section of the room where other students were unable to see what we were doing. I felt that by doing this Sahana would not be distracted by what the other students were doing. I explained to Sahana that she was going to have to read a story to me and I would listen to her. I told her I just wanted to gain a better understanding of how she reads. She did not seem to care that she had to read to me, and began reading. As she read, I followed along in a copy of the text. We used the text Too Little For School that was given to me during class. This was a text that Sahana has never read before so I felt it was appropriate. I was not sure of the reading level of this text so I experimented with it. Sahana did a good job reading the text but did come across some miscues. Including the title, there were one hundred and ten words in the passage, Too Little For School. Hurry was the first word Sahana had trouble with. However, she self-corrected it so it did not count as an error. She repeated the words for and want, but repetition of a word does not count as an error either. When the character name Ted was introduced, she substituted his name for Tad. As the text continued, she substituted the word the for the word said and the word Piggy for the word Peggy. When the character Tad showed up again, she said Dad instead. Further into the text, she made two reversal errors and two more substitutions for the character names (refer to story attached). Out of the one hundred and ten words, she had eight errors. To calculate where Sahana is I subtracted the eight errors from the amount of words in the passage and got one hundred and two. From there I divided one hundred and two from the total

words (one hundred and ten) and got .93. I then multiplied it by one hundred and arrived at an accuracy of 93%. According to the rubric, Sahana is able to read at an instructional reading level for this text because she falls within the 90-95% accuracy. When a teacher becomes aware of a students capability to read text, he or she can then select the appropriate text for that child. Teachers want to challenge their students, but need to choose the right material in order to reach that goal. On the other side of the spectrum, teachers need to make sure that students are not reading texts that are too challenging. If the texts become to demanding, then students will be focused more on trying to decode the text and may lose the overall purpose of a lesson. In order to avoid this, the running record allows teachers to group students accordingly. Instruction can then be based around student strengths and weaknesses. This is great information to use when placing students in appropriate groups for guided reading. A particular goal can then be selected for each group based upon student readiness such as sequencing or main ideas. When the proper books are selected, students are able to read with better accuracy and can focus more on these goals. With independent reading as an objective, creating instruction with gradual release is important. Running records allow for acceptable instruction for each student.