Measuring the Reading Skills of a Student Essay

Introduction

Next door to where we live is a family with an 8-year-old boy who is in the third grade. He says that he does not like to read but that he has to for school and he hates it. “I don’t like reading in class. It’s hard to say the words and everybody laughs at me.” I asked him if there was anything he enjoyed about reading and he said, “Yeah, when we can stop.” I decided to try a different route to see if I could get his participation any better and introduced the topic of comic books. “Do you like Batman or Spiderman?” I asked. “Oh yeah!” So I offered him a few comic books to look at and he enjoyed them, but there was still the question of whether or not he was enjoying them because of the pictures or whether he was able to actually read them. When we discussed the story of the comic book it was apparent that he had not in fact read many of the panels but had instead skimmed them and looked instead at the pictures more than anything. I decided to try yet another route. I asked the boy if he enjoyed listening to others read and he answered, “Yes.” I asked him if his teachers ever read any poetry to him and he said, “No.” I retrieved my book of poems by Shel Silverstein entitled A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends. I read aloud a few humorous poems that I thought he would enjoy and he followed along fairly well, laughing in the right spots and indicating that he understood what was being said. Therefore, I decided to test using the selections from Fountas and Pinnell (2001)—specifically I wanted to assess the student’s ability in comprehension, fluent processing and level of text. I had the feeling that he was actually able to comprehend a lot more than his reading level might have indicated, especially if he struggled with reading but could follow along when someone else read.

Test

Comprehension

The boy’s comprehension was rather well when I read a poem to him: he was able to explain to me what the poem was about. I read a poem entitled “Nobody” by Silverstein, which plays on the concept of “nobody” actually being a person called “Nobody” rather than a non-entity. It could be a tricky poem, I thought, but the boy followed along and laughed when Nobody suddenly began to be personified as being an actual person. I asked him why the poem was funny and he explained, “Because he says nobody loves him and at first you think it’s because he doesn’t have any friends but he’s actually talking about this person named Nobody so really somebody loves him named Nobody!” So he understood perfectly what the poem was reading. So next I wanted to test his fluency in reading.

Fluent Processing

Liben and Paige (2016) state that “a full assessment of reading fluency includes consideration of the three indicators – accuracy, pacing, and prosody.” This aligns with Rasinski’s (2004) assessment recommendations. Liben and Paige (2016) note that accuracy and pacing can be measured with a single metric called accumaticity, which they state “represents the total number of words read correctly during the assessment (the total number of words read minus those that were misread, omitted, or inserted, often called WCPM or CWPM).” The poem “Nobody” contains 140 words. I asked the boy to read it aloud to me. He read rather slowly and paused at virtually every other word. Words that gave him difficulty were ones with double consonants, like “peaches” and “listens” and double vowels like “pears.” It was evident that he did not know how to sound out words or…