Brittany Diltz

Student Teaching
4/27/2015
Progress Monitoring

Academic Progress Monitoring

When I first entered my first grade classroom at Pleasantville Elementary, my
cooperating teacher told me that this class is one of the lowest academic classes
she has had in a very long time. After discussing the differences between the
students and their academic diversity, Mrs. Rector informed me that one student in
particular really struggles with her reading and math. They have already teamed
her up with the Title 1 Reading teacher who has previously assessed her in the FAST
testing. She encouraged me to carry out the individualized daily reading instruction
with this student for my academic progress monitoring.

Once I decided that I was going to work with this student for the remaining of
my time at Pleasantville Elementary I decided that I was going to see how she was
doing with the word and passage reading each day. After the first week I noticed
that she was having a lot of trouble with recognized basic sight words in the text
when she was being timed. Once I noticed this, I decided that I was going to also
introduce flash cards that the student could flip through when she had time to work
on her sight word phrases. I made up these flash cards that have simple Frys sight
word phrases listed on them. This was not something that I wanted to test her over
because I felt that she was having enough testing on reading, however, it was just
something to help her get used to reading these simple phrases and build on the
fluency.

When I started out working with this student, she had just started a new story
from the FAST testing stories. The student gets one time to run through the probe
and story through without any time limit. Then once the student has read through
the probe or story once, I would time them to read as many words correctly as they
can in one minute. The first time she read the new story, she was only able to read
fifty-one words out of ninety-three words while making five mistakes. For the first
time reading through this new passage I wasnt really shocked that her words read
in a minute was so low. The next day she read sixty words out of ninety-three in one
minute with only four errors. I was happy to see that her errors went down by one
and that she had increased her words read in a minute by nine. It took her eight
times to read through the story before passing onto the next story. Below is a graph
of the progress she made over those eight days:

Words Read Correctly In a Story

(93 total words)
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Day 1

Day 2

Day 3
Words Read

Day 4
Errors

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Total Number of Words

Day 8

Word Read in One Minute

(95 total words)
100
80
60
40
20
0
Day 1

Day 2
Words Read

Day 3

Day 4
Errors

Day 5

Day 6

Total Words in Story

Then we were able to move onto the next story in the series once she was able to
read all ninety-three words with no errors. The student read through the passage for
the first time while reading only forty-nine words in a minute out of ninety-five
possible words and she made only three errors. Since this was our first time reading
through the story I was not worried that she had only read forty-nine words in a
minute until I tested her the next day. That next day she read sixty-two words out of
ninety-five possible words with eight errors. This was when I was very worried
because she was just rushing through her reading to make it to the bottom in the
minute that she wasnt even taking her time to read the basic words that she knew.
We are currently still working through this passage, but below shows the graph of
our progress so far with this current passage.
Over the past three weeks of working with the student we have also been
working on the sight word probes. She has been working on the same probe for over
a month before I showed up. There are ninety total sight words on the page, when I
started working with her she was able to read sixty-one words with one mistake. We
are currently still on the same probe and her last testing was at seventy-three with
two mistakes. I am hoping soon that she will be able to finish the probe with no

mistakes because she has read all ninety words before but with multiple errors.
Below is a chart of the progress she has made on this one probe:

Words Read from Sight Word Probe

100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0

Words Read

Errors

Total Words

The one thing that is so frustrating to me during this academic progress

monitoring has been the fact that this students has been so inconsistent with her
reading and data. Two weeks ago we had our MAP testing for reading and she
actually completed all of the questions and made over a full years growth, which
was fantastic. It just has been challenging with seeing her inconsistency and her
accuracy of recognizing and reading those basic sight words. It has been a great
experience being able to work with her and see some growth in her confidence in
reading. I wish I could have more time to work with her and have some more
reliable data.