Running Record

Lesson Plan

Running Record Reflection

                The running record assessment is a great tool for tracking readers’ progress.  An initial assessment can be used to determine an individual student’s reading level in order to provide them with the appropriate level of text.  Follow up assessment can and should be used to gauge student progress and identify any specific weaknesses the reader has in order to address those weaknesses and help the reader become successful.  Running records track readers’ fluency and provide valuable information for instructors to plan for individual students and even small groups. 

                Before conducting the running record assessment for this particular student I was aware that she was having some difficulty with sounding out unfamiliar words and struggled a bit with words that had silent letters.  The student’s confidence level regarding reading was low and therefore she is not always as excited to read a new text as some of her classmates.  The text used is a 2^nd grade level text that has a few words with silent letters and quite a few contractions.  Before beginning the assessment I asked the student if she had ever been on a train to which she responded yes to go to the city around Christmas time.  She also told me she would like to visit Disney in Florida with her mother but they would take a plane not a train.  I told her the story was called One Fast Train Ride and that it is about a young boy that was going on a train ride to visit a family member.  The student had a 93% accuracy rate and a 1:4 self-correction rate.  She made 9 errors in a 135 word text which I didn’t think was too bad considering the information I was given about her reading abilities.  I did notice she confused tenses (i.e. visited rather than visiting) in the beginning of the text but she immediately corrected herself.  She did skip over one or two words but I did notice she was trying to read at a faster pace when she skipped the word(s).  On a few occasions when she came across a contraction she made an error and self-corrected.  There were two words she made errors with due to I believe a visual error.  I had to help her with two words in the text, bullet and scenery.  She did pause when she was reading to ask me what a bullet train was.  She seemed confused at this point and hesitated to move on.  I found this interesting and appreciated her attempt to make meaning of what she was reading.  It was almost as though she couldn’t continue until she knew what that meant.  After conducting this assessment I feel the student needs practice with words that have silent letters or different sounds such as the word ‘scenery’.  I also feel the student could use to practice with recognition of contractions.  

After the student finished reading I asked her what she thought about the story to which she responded it was good and expressed her desire to find out about bullet trains.  When I asked her what the story was about she told me it was about Wes who was going on a train to visit his Grandma.  I asked her how Wes was feeling about the train ride and she told me excited because he was going to visit his Grandma.  I asked the student how Wes' train ride was and she said good.  I noticed that the student did not pick up on the emotions Wes felt during the train ride.  I also feel like the need to know what a bullet train was distracted the student from experiencing the feeling of the rest of the text.  I feel like the student could benefit from developing emotions from a text and making connections to her own emotions.