Katie Hearl

Dr. Manset
SPED 639
March 9, 2018
Project 1

Student Background

Casey (pseudonym) is a ten year old girl from Maui. She is a homeschooled student.

Casey’s lives with her parents, her maternal grandparents, and her older brothers who all speak

English and Hawaiian Pidgin at home. She speaks English proficiently. She does not receive any

services or have any special classifications. Casey is the youngest and second child in her family.

Casey’s parents are working parents, so much of Casey’s and her brother’s education is taken on

by her grandparents.

Casey has a generally positive attitude towards literacy. Her parents and grandparents

encourage both Casey and her brother to try to do the best they can and to push through when

there are struggles. In talking with Casey’s mother, she realizes that because her children

struggle with reading, she needs to do something now in order for them to correct it. She is not

sure currently what that means and knows that her children need help; she just does not know

what specifically to do. In talking with Casey’s grandmother, she says that Casey responds well

to incentives used as motivation tools. One of the biggest incentives that Casey has for doing

well in school is a monthly dinner and Barnes and Noble trip with her grandmother, which is

earned for progressing through school and/or good behavior. Her grandmother reports that it is a

good motivation incentive for Casey. Casey recently started the Junie B. Jones book series and is

moving through them quite quickly. She likes books that are funny and books that teach her how

to do a skill, like baking or cooking.

 The setting for these assessments were administered after school hours at Casey’s home

in her living room, away from others to prevent distractions. Because Casey has never been a

traditional school setting, she does not have any formal or informal assessment scores. The

curriculum that her family currently uses is IXL, which does have a diagnostic assessment for

both English Language Arts and Math, but she has not completed either. She is currently

working at second grade level curriculum for both English Language Arts and Math.

Assessments

There were several assessments that were administered to Casey over the course of three

work sessions. For the word lists, Casey was assessed on the pre-primer 1-3 lists and primer

through third lists. She also was assessed on the Student Reading by Analogy List. Because

Casey has no previous assessment scores, it was decided that she start the passage reading at the

lowest level and progress by level until she reached a frustrational reading level passage. All

passage assessments are included except for the third grade passage. The third grade passage was

clearly her frustration level and based on her body language and reaction while she was reading

it, I suggested we take a break and come back to it later. Because I did not want to discourage her

in the process, we did not come back to it at a later time. She read both the pre-primer and primer

word lists at an independent level, so in the interest of time and student stamina, Casey started at

the primer level reading passage. She read one narrative passage from each level in the primar

through third range and all three narrative passages at the second level. The Elementary Spelling

Inventory and the CBM Writing Expression Probe assessment were also administered.

Reading​ :
 Casey’s Independent reading level is currently is at a first grade reading level. Her

Instructional reading level is at a second grade reading level and her Frustration reading level is

at a third grade reading level. Her scores on the Word List assessments generally match her

reading levels. For those narrative passages, Casey’s strengths include retell and comprehension

of the story. She is able to provide many specific details of the passages that she read. In

speaking with her mother, she mentioned that Casey has a great memory, especially for small

details that oftentime get overlooked and forgotten by others. Casey’s current instructional level

for comprehension questions is at the second grade level. According to the Oral Reading Prosody

Scale-- QRI-6 rubric and when reading at her instructional reading level, Casey scores a two out

of four. She primarily reads in two-word phrases, with occasional three- or four-word grouping.

She does not have much expression when she reads out loud and reads all punctuation with the

same expression.

Summary Reading Analysis

Casey’s instructional level is a second grade level. In comparison with the level of her

current school curriculum, it equates. However, given that she would be in fifth grade in a

traditional school setting, she is about three grade levels behind where her age places her. There

does not seem to really be a noticeable difference in her ability to identify words in context and

isolation. She does self correct frequently in both settings and sounds out words that she is

unfamiliar with. Based on her assessments, Casey seems to perform equally on familiar and

unfamiliar text. Throughout our assessments, she did have the opportunity to use look backs for

comprehension and retelling, but did not use them. She has a pretty good memory for what she

read, so she may have felt like she did not need it. Also, because she is not in a traditional school
setting, she is not really used to being prompted to look back into the text and to use it as a

resource. While comprehension and retelling is one of Casey’s reading strengths, her retelling

ability is stronger than her comprehension. She is able to provide more specific and detailed

answers when prompted to retell the story in chronological order, oftentimes using specific

vocabulary from the text. Her responses to the comprehension questions are not as detailed.

Spelling

Casey’s total spelling score was 33 out of 87. Based on what she got correct on the

spelling assessment, she is transitioning between the emergent/letter-name alphabetic stage. Her

strengths in spelling include consonants, short vowels, and digraphs. Long vowels and other

vowel combinations are a challenge for Casey. For some of Casey’s reading miscues and

spelling errors, it seems as though she makes up what the word should be or how it should be

spelled based on the either the beginning sounds of the word or the ending sounds of the word.

This is not consistent throughout all of her miscues, but is something that I noticed when

completing the reading miscue analysis.

Writing Fluency​ spelling and punctuation skills in context.

For this assessment, Casey was given the prompt “In the morning, I opened my door and

saw five horses standing in the street. Then…” She wrote a total of 22 words in three minutes.

All 22 were spelled correctly and she scored 20 for correct writing sequences. In the content of

her writing, she repeats many of the words in the prompt and makes sense to the topic. She

correctly capitalizes “I”, however, she does not include any punctuation in her writing, thus

making capitalization errors at the beginning of sentences as well.

Overall Summary and Recommendations

 Overall, Casey strengths include her retell and comprehension skills and utilizing

decoding skills when encountering unfamiliar words both in and out of context. Casey could

benefit from fluency interventions such as repeated reading or Fluency-Oriented Reading

Instruction (FORI) to increase her prosody. This would also help increase her confidence as a

reader. She could also benefit from direct and explicit instruction in regards to spelling. She has

never had a spelling curriculum and relies on her decoding skills to spell out words based on how

they sound rather than following spelling rules. Word part study and/or word family studies may

be beneficial to learn some of those spelling rules and patterns. Casey could also benefit from

direct and explicit instruction with writing mechanics. Focusing on punctuation, capitalization,

and other writing mechanics would help increase her correct writing sequences. It would be

beneficial to perhaps do two more writing CBM to get a more accurate baseline for her writing

skills, seeing as how I have not worked with her on writing at all and have limited background

knowledge of her skill set.