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Sean Laughlin 741 Original Assignment With Feedback

Sean conducted a 5-week case study assessing the reading skills of 7-year-old Matilda. Matilda showed strong phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency skills. Though she sometimes rushed and made mistakes, her scores were often above grade level. Sean recommends further challenging assessments and continued vocabulary development to support Matilda's advanced reading abilities.

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120 views3 pages

Sean Laughlin 741 Original Assignment With Feedback

Sean conducted a 5-week case study assessing the reading skills of 7-year-old Matilda. Matilda showed strong phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency skills. Though she sometimes rushed and made mistakes, her scores were often above grade level. Sean recommends further challenging assessments and continued vocabulary development to support Matilda's advanced reading abilities.

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Case Study: Final Plan and Presentation

Sean Laughlin

University of Kansas

SPED 898

Dr. Brasseur-Hock

May 25, 2020


Case Study: Final Plan and Presentation

Over the past five weeks, I have gotten the opportunity to meet with and get
to know Matilda. She is a seven-year-old who is about to begin second grade.
Matilda parents are both engineering professors at the University of Arkansas, who
obviously are huge advocates in strong academics, which has a lot to say about who
Matilda is as a student. Both of her parents are from Northern Europe, which means
they have accents and Matilda carries a tiny one as well. Matilda has a passion art,
whether that is coloring, drawing, or painting; she enjoys it all. She also loves
playing with her five-year-old brother. It doesn’t matter if they are out on the
trampoline or inside playing Xbox, they play great together!
Matilda’s goals as a student include becoming a better reader, where she can
read more advanced books. Matilda also wants to become a better drawer. Her
learning abilities really blew me away. I didn’t have many expectations for how she
would do before starting the assessments, but I quickly realized she is a fantastic
student who is eager to learn.
Each week, I would go to Matilda’s home and we would do the specific
assessment for that particular week. The first week was Phonemic Awareness,
which had two types of assessments. Both of which were sounding out the word
listed. One worksheet had real words and the other was a list of nonsense words.
Matilda did outstanding on both the PSF and the NWF, missing just a couple on each
assessment. After the time was up, I asked her if she had done this in class because
she seemed very comfortable and she said with a smile on her face “nope, I am just
good at words.” That quote can kind of give you an example of what doing these
assessments with her were like because of her confidence with reading and English.
Week two was focused on Phonics, as well as word study that had her
reading passages and being corrected on fluency. The assessment was the DIBELS
Oral Reading Fluency Assessment (ORF). This assessment had me interested in how
she would do since obviously reading is still a new skill to her, but she did fantastic.
With each passage she got more confident, which lead to better scores. In the second
passage she read, she made two corrections on words she originally read
incorrectly, which showed composure and great decoding skills.
I do think she is proficient, due to her great decoding skills and adjustments
during the passage. She was also able to give quality responses for each passage.
None of them were in a meaningful sequence, but she was able to state facts of what
she just read.
The following assessment’s focus was specifically for fluency. It was an
assessment where Matilda would read a passage that had blanks mid sentence.
There were three word options and she had to correctly choose the right word to fill
in the blanks.
The CORE Reading Maze Comprehension Test was very easy to see her
working through these worksheets week to week, has created a lot more confidence
in her even though the subjects are changing. Her speed picked up a lot more on
passage 2B than in passage 2A. But, that is also just a part of getting in the rhythm of
things.
She is a very smart second grader, and she seems to only make mistakes
when she tries to go too fast which has been the same story week to week. This one
also created a couple incorrect responses when she wouldn’t read the words
following the three options. She more guessed what was coming next instead of
seeing what direction the sentence was going in. This issue caused this assessment
to be her worst based on grade because she would try to read as fast as possible and
then answer as quick as she could as well instead of taking her time. Though this
was statistically her worst week of the five, she still showed tremendous reading
fluency skills that I imagine most kids her age do not have.
Week four involved a worksheet that was over vocabulary. The objective of
the assessment was to match a synonym to the word given. For example, run would
match with jog. There were multiple assessments of the CORE Vocabulary
Screening Assessment. Overall, her lowest score was 23 correct out of 30, so that
places her at the benchmark level, which is awesome. She took her time on most of
them, but sometimes felt rushed to do them quickly though I reminded her there
was no need to rush. The two issues she ran into were either not knowing the word,
or the three options, or she tried to go to fast which caused her to miss multiple per
page.
For her age she did great, her scores would probably at the top of her class
academically. It was awesome to see her work through each word, deciding if that
word matched or not. She loves doing these assessments each week and finding out
what her score was as well as seeing where that is on the grading scale.
The last assessment of the semester involved comprehension of a written
passage or question. Due to poor planning on my part, Matilda was in Europe
visiting family. To do the best I could with the assessment on different continents, I
made a document that will be attached, that had my written math problems typed
out, as well as an article that I copied and pasted onto the document with questions
for her. I emailed the document to her mom and we did the assessment via Skype. I
know it was not ideal but it was the best we could do.
Matilda did a great job of reading the math questions as well as reading the
article and questions though the article did have some difficult words for her. Every
word that she needed help with I underlined. I think she showed impressive
previous knowledge skills while doing the math portion as well as answering the
questions over the article. I chose to not have her look back on the article when
answering the questions just to see how much she comprehended and I was
impressed with her even though she didn’t get all of them correct.
Future recommendations for Matilda’s learning progression would definitely
to test her with harder assessments due to her being an advanced student. I would
also continue to grow her vocabulary, which will help her a lot in becoming a better
reader.

Instructor Comment copied from Canvas: “I appreciated your positive,


hopeful approach in the case study about this student. It was familiar without being
unprofessional.”

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