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EDU 345 SFA Tutoring Final Exam

Fall 2014
Maryjacqueline Fox

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Introduction to Tutee
At first glance Emily may seem only like a shy first-grade girl; however, after working
with her over the last few months, I was able to get to know her for the bright and enthusiastic
person that she is. Emily is a very well-behaved student. Throughout our tutoring sessions, she
would patiently wait during transitions in activities and help pack up my materials, so that they
were well organized at the end of each session. Also, Emily loves to write and draw. She looked
forward to activities where she was able to write. On some days when there was a small pause
between activities, she would quietly draw or continue to write a sentence on a separate sheet of
paper that I provided. Lastly, Emily loves her family. Many of our conversations about her
weekend events consisted of her going to watch her two older brothers play football; one day she
even came in with a pin of her brother in his football jersey attached to her school uniform.
Overall, Emily is a sweet, task-oriented, and bright little girl.
Pre-assessment Results
After the initial assessment was completed, I was able to understand where Emily was in
relation to grasping reading concepts. According to the data, she had mastered her phonemic
awareness skills; she was able to identify, blend, and segment individual phonemes in words.
Furthermore, she received mastery in concepts of print. Therefore, she displayed abilities like
being able to locate a title and know the directionality of print. Emily began to show some
trouble when we reached the Letter Skills portion of the assessment. She could not identify the
letter sounds for the letters ck, b, ng, q, ar, and ou. Additionally, she could not write the letters
for the sounds ck, e, ng, and q. When she was presented with the letter q, she did not know its
name. As we went through the Sight Words section, Emily did not know many of the sight

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words in the first two sets of the assessment; examples of these unknown words are on, of, look,
he, and by. Similarly, Emily had trouble in the Word Skills section. She couldnt read words in
three sets of the first part of the section; these words were ant, cup, deck, them, and wash.
Lastly, the second part of this section revealed her trouble between distinguishing the letters b
and d, since she confused the letters as she tried to write the word bed. These results were
extremely beneficial in guiding my lesson plans for tutoring Emily; after looking over this data
and comparing it with the SFA tutoring manual, I determined that Emily should be placed in the
Tutoring Plan 2 template.
Re-Assessment Results
Emily showed progress through the results from her second assessment. In the Letter
Skills section Emily affirmed this progress by her new mastery of skills. She was able to identify
the letter sounds for ck, b, q, ar, ie, _y, oy, and er. However, she still had trouble with the letter
sound for ng. As we went through the second part of this section, even though she had trouble
with writing ng she showed new mastery of writing the letters for the sounds ck, e, and q.
Additionally, she attained new mastery for identifying the name of the letter q. When we went
over the Sight Words part of the assessment, Emily showed progress in knowing new sight
words, but she still struggled with multiple sight words in the four subsections. While assessing
Emily in the Word Skills section, she displayed new mastery of being able to read multiple
words like ant and cup; however, she still struggled with reading many of the words in the six
subsections. Some of the words she had trouble with are cup, them, and rice. Lastly, in the
second part of this section Emily received new mastery in spelling the words top and bed through
writing, yet she had trouble with rake, cone, and queen. The results from this second assessment

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informed my instruction in showing me that Emily needed to continue to stay in the Tutoring
Plan 2 template and work on spelling and reading skills.
Summative Assessment Results
The final assessment with Emily provided information on what skills she had improved
on, and what skills she had not quite yet mastered and still needed to improve on. Emily had
mastered everything in the first grade spectrum of the Letter Skills section except for identifying
the letter sound and writing the letters associated with the sound for ng. She mastered many new
words in the Sight Words part of the assessment; some of these words were all, began and
please. However, she still had trouble with some of the words like of and out. Similarly, she
showed improvement in the Word Skills section, through mastery of reading words like deck and
pool. Although she still struggled with spelling some words in the second part of this section,
her mastery of the first sets of both subsections led to the advancement into the third part of the
assessment.
Therefore, as we continued on to the third part of the assessment, Emily showed mastery
and deficits in more reading skills. She showed mastery in reading some multi-syllabic words
(like yellow, never, and happen); however, as the words became more complex (like instrument,
recognize, and register), Emily was unable to decode them. Emily mastered the Tracking
portion of the assessment; thus, she was successful at skills like reading with one-to-one
correspondence and without skipping words. In the Fluency section Emily read a passage from a
story and was able to read both accurately and smoothly with some errors in misreading words.
Additionally, Emily received a score of 54 out of 57 on her Words Correct Per Minute
assessment. In the Comprehension section Emily showed both mastery and need for

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improvement with the skills in this section. One area that she was still developing and needed to
improve on was identifying errors in reading words and trying to correct these errors. Lastly, as
we worked on the Writing section, Emily showed mastery in writing both a one word and one
phrase response. Nonetheless, she was still developing in writing a full sentence and paragraph
response; she wrote two sentences, yet they did not have the correct punctuation to separate
them. Thus, the results from this final assessment helped guide my instruction in teaching Emily
with the Tutoring Lesson Plan 3.
Final Recommendation for Tutee
Through looking over the data from the summative assessment on Emilys reading skills
and using the background knowledge of her skills from tutoring, I would suggest that Emily
receives continual support through tutoring. Although Emily grew in her Letter Skills and most
of her Sight Word abilities, she still displayed the need for improvement with other reading
skills. The areas that she needs support with primarily are decoding multi-syllable words, Sight
Word recognition, and reading comprehension. If I continued to tutor Emily, then I would focus
my attention on her Word Skills in regards to decoding multi-syllable words. Additionally, I
would try to create a Sight Word game that is interactive where she can practice reading Sight
Words in an engaging way. Even though she improved in recognizing many Sight Words, there
were many of these words that she continually had trouble with and needed continual practice to
master. Through focusing on these skills, my hope would be that her reading comprehension
skills like recognizing and correcting word errors would improve. Therefore, I believe that
continual support for Emily would be beneficial to help her continue to advance her reading
skills.

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Two Significant Ideas from Tutoring
After this experience of tutoring Emily, I realized the importance of using assessments to
guide instruction and positive reinforcement to improve rapport with the student. My instruction
was based on the results that I saw from not only the formal assessments, but also the ongoing
informal assessments from observation that I used with Emily. The data from the formal
assessments helped to inform my decisions in the correct lesson plans to use with Emily;
additionally, my daily observations of her improvements and continual struggles with reading
skills helped me to know the necessary skills to work on in each following session. Thus,
through these experiences, I recognized how crucial and beneficial it is to use assessments to
guide instruction. In doing so, the educator is able to clearly see the areas that the child needs to
improve on, which leads to better instructional strategies that focus on improving these weak
areas. Moreover, through tutoring Emily, I learned how to further implement positive
reinforcement techniques to help form a good relationship with my student. As Emily showed
positive behavior or tried her best in the activities, then I would encourage her through affirming
the good qualities that she was showing. Furthermore, I would explicitly say my expectations
for her through using phrases like, I know that you will do so well today sitting in your chair
and participating in the activities. Emily responded well to the positive encouragement, and
when she knew what my expectations were, she tried her best to meet them. Thus, this
experience was extremely beneficial in realizing the importance of assessment guided instruction
and positive reinforcement techniques.