Becca Wells

Sped 741
Module 1
Hypothesis

After reviewing the case studies, I choose Sofia and Diante. To start off I will begin with Sofia,
she is 10 years old and is in the fourth grade. Sofia happens to have the attribute of Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder. She is a very talented young lady who enjoys gymnastics and art. However, she
does struggle with math, spelling and language arts. According to her IEP it is noted that she is well
behind her peers in fluency and needs to be able to increase this so she can keep up with her general
education curriculum. The hypothesis that I am going with on why Sofia has issues with her fluency is
that she has difficulties with her focus and too many people and/or friends in one location. It would be
beneficial for Sofia to have a tier three intervention, as it would help her to have small group instruction
in a quiet location to help improve her fluency skills. This could also help her to focus and be able to
improve her skills if she had a location that limited her distractions. I find that it would be helpful to
know her Dibels score in fluency so that I could accurately know where to start her with practice
passages. By using leveled passages, you could slowly increase her fluency skills by changing the levels
once she become fluent with the passage. She would need frequent progress monitoring but should
improve with the right instruction.

As for Diante, he is a young gentleman who is 15 years old and in the ninth grade. He is a very
optimistic young man, has an extensive vocabulary and is an eager learner. Diante happens to have a
Learning Disability in reading. I hypothesis that since Diante has a lot of issues with his comprehension
that he pulls back in reading classes as his comprehension fluctuates between 40% and 80% making
things difficult for him in class. Normally he is an eager to learn and engage in class unless he is having
difficulties with his comprehension. So it is my thoughts that he would benefit from a Tier three
intervention of a small group instruction structured to increase his comprehension skills in a quiet
separate environment. It would be helpful to know his current test scores in comprehension so you have
an idea of where to start, but continue with progress monitoring to make sure that you have a
consistent growth. Diante would also benefit from having his materials on tape where he would be able
to listen to his readings while he reads along to help with his comprehension as he does better with oral
comprehension than silent reading comprehension. It might be best in order to have growth in his
comprehension to start him with reading at the level of his comprehension skills having him go through
the comprehension questions so he can fully understand the text and slowing increasing his levels until
he has a good growth rate, this will need to continue throughout his school career as the level of
comprehension needed as he continues to go through school is going to continually raise. This
intervention will not only improve his comprehension skills but it will also help him with his reading
fluency and decoding skills, which are two areas that he also could use improvement on.