Case Study and Biography 1

Case Study and Annotated Biography

O.W
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
EEU 350
Alexis Verzolini
March 16th 2017
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Case Study and Annotated Biography

On March 16th 2017 I met with O.W an eleven year old fifth grade student at South

Eastern Intermediate School to administrate the Basic Reading Inventory to learn a little more

about her I administrated an interest inventory. I then administrated a word list and passages

from the BRI. To get permission to conduct this test I called her mother and asked her if I

could give her daughter the test. When I went to her house I gave her mother the

permission slip to sign. I gave my test in the evening after school.

Background Information

Through a discussion with O.W mother on the phone she told me about the

background of their family. O.W lives with both of her parents and her older brother. She is in

fifth grade and her brother is in ninth grade. Both children go to the public school district in the

area. Both her parents work , her father works for a car dealership and her mother works at

as a pair professional at the intermediate school community that O.W attends.Their family

is financially stable.

I did the BRI at O.W home on the 16th of March. She is very involved in school She

told me that she is a part of Girls on The Run and organization that focuses on giving

girls life skills though lessons and running games. She also told me that she is involved in

lacrosse and basketball. She told me that likes sweet candy (gummy bears are her favorite)

and her favorite color is blue. At the time that I gave the test her brother was in the

office space doing homework and her parents we watching March Madness in the living

room. O.W’s mother set us up in the formal dining room so there would be minimal noise. O.W

seems to have an active school and home life that supports her learning.
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Procedure

Survey:

Before starting the testing, I gave O.W a survey asking her a number of questions

about her reading habits to find out more about what kind of reader O.W is before giving the

Basic Reading Inventory. O.W enjoys reading for pleasure she likes to read realistic fiction,

historical fiction, and graphic novels. Some of here favorite books are Wonder and Boy in the

Strip Pajamas. Some books she would like to read are Eggs, Hatchet, Smile, Drama, and Dork

Dairies.

Graded Word List:

After getting to know what kind of reader O.W is I began the word lists. I started

with third grade word from the BRI. I selected Form C based on the passages in that section

because I felt they would grab her interest. I began the word lists at word list List C 3183

the third grade so that she would have something easier begin with so that would make her

feel more confident and relaxed. O.W scored independent level for wordlists third grade

through sixth grade. At seventh grade, she reached instructional level. At eight grade, she

reached frustration. Based on these results I decided to start Form C Passage C5414 the

fourth grade passage because even though she score independent on the fifth and six grade

wordlists she had to self-correct on those more then on the fourth grade list so wanted to

make sure that she was reading a passage that she could defiantly read as practice so that she

knew what to expect. After we completed the wordlist we took a small break and then

began the passages.

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Graded Passages:

I gave O.W Passage C5414 as a passage for her to practice. I choose this passage so that she

would be have no trouble reading it so that she would know what to expect. I did not

evaluate Passage C5414 because it was only used to introduce the procedure to O.W.

I then began testing O.W., I used Form C just like I did for the wordlist because

there was a stories that I thought would grab her interest. I began with passage C8595 one

level below her highest independent grade on the wordlists. She read the passage with good

fluency and expression. For passages on a fifth and sixth grade reading level she read at the

independent reading level. For seventh grade she read at the independent/instructional level

but her reading was slower and she made a lot more errors in her reading but she self-

corrected them. At passage C 8183 she scored at the independent / instructional level but she

had a few self-correction that would have been significant miscues and I could tell that she

was struggling because she was pausing a lot so I decided to stop with that passage.

After each passage there was a series comprehension questions. For the fourth, fifth

,sixth, and seventh grade passages O.W scored independent level. She was able to identify key

element and events from the story. However when we got to the eight grade passage she

scored in the instructional/ frustration range. As I asked O.W the questions I could see that

even though she had done decent on reading part of the passage she didn’t understand

what the passage was about. She would begin to answer the question and pause for a

really long time and look down at the passage to try to find the answer. She also

couldn’t remember details from the passage if the questions were looking for specific

answers. So I decided that I was going to end my testing at this passage.

Analysis
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After finishing the passages I added up all the miscues from the passages and the word

lists and determined her reading levels. I conclude that her independent reading level was

between fifth and sixth grade. On the word list she was able to identify nineteen out of twenty

words at first sight on the fifth grade list and was able to get all the words after being able to use

her decoding skills in order to identify the words. On The six grade passage she had few miscues

and only one comprehension question wrong. I determined that O.W has an instructional level is

between sixth and seventh grade. On the seventh grade word list she was only unable to identify

two words. When it came to the seventh grade passage she had two miscues and missed no

comprehension questions. Finally I determined that O.W frustration on an eighth grade level. On

the word lists she was unable to identify five words. On the eighth grade passage she had three

miscues and missed four comprehension questions.

O.W has many strengths in reading, particularly with decoding unknown words. In

several of the passages she was able to self correct a lot of her miscues by use many different

reading strategies such as using context clues. For example in the sixth grade passage O.W read

“ In first period, Mrs. Nichols was talking…” and looked at the the next word which was

attendance and self corrected the word to taking. This shows that she was understanding what

she was reading and has a good enough vocabulary to realize that the word talking did not

belong in the sentence.This can also be show again later in the passage when O.W when in the

seventh grade passage she substitutes the word temperature for temperate and self-corrected.

This shows that she uses syntactic, semantic gephomic skills to figure out words.

O.W does have some weakness as well, mainly with the comprehension questions. Of

the forty comprehension questions asked she missed eight questions six of which were fact

questions. That means that seventy five percent of the missed questions where fact questions.
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This shows that O.W has a hard time picking out the most important information from the text

and remembering what happened in the text.

Recommendations

After analyzing O.W results I came up with some ways to support her growth in her

comprehension skills. A strategy that I would suggest for O.W is story mapping. Story mapping

requires students to identify characters, settings, events, problems, and resolution in the text. I

feel that this would be beneficial to O.W because it's helps students identify detail form the text.

I fell that by using this strategy O.W will improve on picking out what is important an

unimportant in text.