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Running head: LITERACY PROFILE CASE STUDY

Critical Task: Literacy Profile Case Study

Lisa Reagan

Youngstown State University

Introduction

This case study is based on a student named Kaliyah E. Kaliyah is nine years old as of the

beginning of January. She is in the third grade at Volney Rogers Elementary School. Many

assessments were administered throughout the semester. All of which provided a great outlook of

Kaliyah’s literacy development, featuring her strengths and challenges. Kaliyah also presented

some growth after interventions to improve her fluency were administered. Overall, learning

more about this student through many different assessments helped me understand her literacy

development.

Student’s Current Literacy Strengths

From January to April of this year, many assessments were administered to find data on

Kaliyah’s literacy. First, an interest inventory was administered to find out more about her and

her interests. It was found that Kaliyah is not particularly fond of reading, but she does enjoy

comics, novels, as well as books about science and fairytales. The spelling inventory showed that

Kaliyah late letter-name alphabetic spelling stage. The oral retelling analysis showed that

Kaliyah has great comprehension skills. While her silent reading received a good score, she

really excelled when the story was read to her. It seems that this was because she was able to

understand more when she did not have to focus on sounding out words.

The benchmark assessment showed that Kaliyah’s independent level of reading is a level

I. Before this, a level H was administered and was found to also be in her independent level of

reading. Her instructional level of reading was found to be a level K. Her frustration level was

not found since the first two benchmarks were within her independent level, before skipping to a

letter K for the purpose of finding her instructional level. Her comprehension for all three
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benchmarks were great, which showed that comprehension is a strength for Kaliyah. Her scores

for the independent level were higher for comprehension, though, even with her instructional

level she still did well on comprehension of the text.

Overall, Kaliyah has many strengths in her literacy development. One of which is

comprehension, which was shown through the oral retell and the comprehension conversation

from the benchmark assessment. The oral retelling showed that Kaliyah was able to cover nearly

every point from the book in her retelling of the story, which showed that she was able to grasp

the entirety of the text. The comprehension conversation showed that Kaliyah could provide

detailed responses to texts she read at her independent level. Another strength is Kaliyah’s

accuracy rate while reading independent and instructional level texts. She was able to read many

of the words in the texts, always reading between 95% and 97% accuracy for the various levels.

She did not have many miscues and she was able to self-correct 1:5 miscues for every

benchmark. According to Reutzel and Cooter (2016), self-corrections are not counted as

miscues, which are words that the student is unable to correctly identify. Another strength that

Kaliyah exhibited is her ability to identify digraphs and blends when spelling. On the spelling

inventory, she scored 6 out of 7 for digraphs and 5 out of 7 for blends. This is a strong area for

Kaliyah’s spelling, which shows that she does well with identifying digraphs and blends. While

Kaliyah has many other strengths, these seem to be the most evident due to the assessment given

throughout the past few months.

Student’s Current Literacy Challenges

While Kaliyah has many strengths, she also has some challenges when it comes to

literacy. One of which was showing her comprehension through writing, which seemed to be a

difficult task for Kaliyah. The writing prompt asked Kaliyah to write about how the character felt
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at the beginning and at the end of the story. She was able to write two sentences, providing a

brief description of how he felt during the beginning and end of the story. Her writing

vocabulary seems to be limited. She was unable to write a clear introduction or conclusion to the

writing sample. Overall, this seems to be a main challenge for Kaliyah as writing is critical.

Another challenge that I noticed is her ability to decode unknown words and use appropriate

strategies to decipher it. The attitude inventory showed that Kaliyah’s first response when she

comes across an unknown word is to ask an adult or friend. While working throughout the

semester, I tried to teach some strategies for her to decode unknown words, but she would keep

returning to asking what the word was. While asking an adult or friend is a good strategy, it

should not be something she relies on. Sounding the word out, using context clues, picture clues,

and other strategies would be more beneficial to Kaliyah while coming across unknown words.

Therefore, Kaliyah may have to improve her metacognition strategies. According to Reutzel and

Cooter (2016), metacognition is very important in the selection of strategies to comprehend and

regulate their own learning. Kaliyah is still growing in her literacy development, but further

interventions could be provided for writing and decoding, which could involve metacognition

strategies to think about her own progress.

Evidence-Based Reading Strategies

I have found three reading strategies that could help Kaliyah with her writing

comprehension and decoding of unknown words. The first is story grammar instruction, which

focuses on learning about story structure. This strategy would be beneficial to Kaliyah’s writing

comprehension because without knowledge of story structure a student can have a hard time

comprehending the story elements (Reutzel & Cooter, 2016). It could help her understand the

format of stories and the parts that need to be covered when writing about them. Kaliyah has
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great comprehension when retelling about a story and pointing out the critical elements, but this

information needs to be taught in a way for her to be able to write about it the way she explains

it. The visual organizer can help Kaliyah identify the setting, problem, goal, events, and

resolution through writing each one by one.

The second strategy is becoming a word detective, which could help Kaliyah in decoding

unknown words. This would help her by being more able to comprehend a text that has an

unknown word, which could increase her comprehension of instructional level texts. According

to Reutzel and Cooter (2016), vocabulary strategies should be taught to help students figure out

the meanings of unknown words. While she may still need to practice sounding out words,

knowing their meaning is quite important as well.

The third strategy that could benefit Kaliyah is a word wall. According to Reutzel and

Cooter (2016), a word wall helps to gain student attention to words expose students to words,

whether high-frequency or words that they need to know for a text. This strategy would be

helpful to Kaliyah by exposing her to more vocabulary, therefore, being able to know more

words simply by sight. She can work on learning the word and what the word means by using

this strategy. Kaliyah could also do word sorts with the words from the word wall, as they are

accessible and easy to move around. This could further her knowledge of words that are

commonly used that may be difficult to sound out.

Reflection of Student’s Growth

Kaliyah has shown many strengths, as well as, some challenges while working on

assessments the past couple months. One strength was Kaliyah’s oral retelling which shows that

she does have great comprehension skills. She is able to retell a story orally with most, if not all,

components of the story. Though, she may have difficulty putting those thoughts onto paper.
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This leads me into her weakness of writing comprehension, which is something that she will

need to continue to improve on. She has difficulty writing about what she comprehends,

therefore, she may need some strategies to help her do this successfully. Kaliyah also has a great

accuracy rate for independent and instruction texts at her level. She was able to read without

many errors, which is what made it so hard to find her instructional and frustration levels. While

she doesn’t have many miscues while reading, she does have a hard time decoding unknown

words. Decoding and finding the meaning of unknown words is a weakness for Kaliyah, as it

could limit her comprehension if she does not understand a word essential for comprehension.

Kaliyah also had a strength for spelling digraphs and blends during the spelling inventory, which

shows that she has great knowledge of these word features.

The choices that I made for strategies to continue Kaliyah’s literacy growth were based

on her literacy challenges. The goal is to improve her writing ability so it can show her great

comprehension skills. Another goal is to improve her word knowledge for deciphering how to

sound out and identify the meaning of unknown words. The story grammar instruction strategy

can help Kaliyah identify the components needed to write about a story, by including all of the

elements that are essential to show her comprehension through writing. The word detective

strategy can help her find the meaning of unknown words by analyzing the word in depth. The

word wall strategy will expose Kaliyah to more words that she needs to know, which will

enhance her word knowledge and ability to identify words. These three strategies will help

Kaliyah become a better reader and writer, which are essential components to literacy

development. The next steps for Kaliyah are to practice her writing to show her full potential of

comprehension, making sure to help her step by step in this process. Another step is to help her
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learn strategies for unknown words, such as, becoming a word detective. This strategy as well as

the word wall com increase her vocabulary, which will help her become more fluent in reading.

Reflection of Teacher Candidate’s Growth

While administering many assessments throughout the semester, I found that it is not

always easy to analyze results. I always made sure that Kaliyah knew that the assessments were

not graded, which eased her anxiety. I feel that making sure that the student is comfortable and at

ease is a great way to make sure results are accurate and the student is willing to participate. I

feel that this is a strength of mine for administering assessments. Another strength would be my

thoroughness of each assessment, making sure to include as many details as possible. This

helped me understand the bigger picture of the student. Analyzing a student’s behavior, in

addition to the results, is also a great part of administering assessments. If a student is having an

off day, I know that their results may not be an accurate representation of their skills and

abilities. A weakness of mine during the assessments was analyzing the results. For example,

when scoring the students writing sample on the rubric, I had to stop myself from giving her a

better score. At first, I was very lenient with the scores, then I took another look and realized that

she did not meet the criteria for the scores I had given. I know this is something that I have to

work on because I need to grade based on the student’s pure ability to complete the task.

I do feel that I did good administering assessments. I always explained the task

beforehand, to assure that the student understood what was expected of her. If she missed a

word, I would make sure that the student was not able to see my notes. As this could have been a

distraction to her focus on the assessment. I think the next steps for my personal and profession

growth are to make sure that I stay consistent with grading. I hear a lot of my professors say that

they read each paper before they start grading them, simply just to make sure that expectations
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stay the same throughout grading. I feel that although time consuming, this is a great practice for

teachers. It is great to know the average results. If I started grading with an excellent paper that is

over the top, then I graded one with the bare minimum after, I may not be providing an accurate

grade for their work that has the needed components. Overall, this experience has taught me a lot

about my growth as a future teacher and I feel that I showed growth in administering assessment

throughout each one that was given.

References

Reutzel, D. R., & Cooter, R. B. (2016). Strategies for reading assessment and instruction in an

era of Common Core Standards: Helping every child succeed (5th ed.). Boston, MA:

Pearson Education.