EDUC551 Midterm

EDUC551 Midterm

Name:

Institution:

EDUC551 Midterm

The interview with Paul provided new insights on strategies that may be utilized by instructors to enhance interest in reading amongst students. The interview with Paul provided me with an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of prevailing instruction strategies in cultivation of interest and specific attitudes towards reading and listening amongst young students. Studies indicate that effective instruction of junior class students is reliant on a variety of common practices shared by professionals. The interview with the student was essential towards providing an affirmation of the critical nature of developing student centered assessments and instruction to ensure that they develop positive attitudes and interest in reading and listening.

The need to develop long lasting interest in reading arose from the view that skills are subsidiary to interest of students in reading activities (Fountas & Pinnell, 2009). Fountas and Pinell’s Benchmark Assessment system is an effective and appropriate framework that correlates assessment to classroom instruction within the continuum of literacy learning (Fountas & Pinnell, 2009). The child mentioned that he had enjoyed reading Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince by J. K. Rowling (Rowling & GrandPré, 2005). There are three literary elements to focus on in assessing the literate abilities of the students, which include artifacts, observations, and interactions.

1. Artifacts: they include the meanings or products derived by the student during reading and subsequent responses to the information contained in the reading. The student illustrated capability in association of meanings contained in the text with real life events and contexts.
2. Observations: such includes the information and notes collected by observing the students engage in selected literate activities. In this case, the information collected from observing the student narrate his understanding and experience from reading the selected text. Observations collected included the read aloud responses provided by the student in relation to summarizing the identified text. In addition, observations were also made in relation to the student’s fluency and capacity to utilize idioms and vocabularies.
3. Interactions: This segment includes the communication and discussion that are undertaken by the instructor and the student. Furthermore, interactions with the student provided innumerable benefits in terms of the progress achieved by the student in reading activities.

From the exchange with the student, the student was able to provide brief yet accurate descriptions of events, which were covered in the book. The student was able to illustrate exceptional growth in terms of reading and summarizing written texts orally and in writing (Fountas & Pinnell, 2009). There was utilization of observational checklists, which was constructed with the aim of understanding the learning experiences, dispositions, and behavior of the identified student. This was critical towards understanding the learning behaviors, abilities, and needs of the students, which may be overlooked in the course of the assessment.

In addition, there was conduct of an oral reading analysis, which was founded on three forms namely informal reading inventory, miscue analysis and running records (Fountas & Pinnell, 2009). The informal reading inventories were a means of collection of various word lists and leveled passages, which were used to assess the student’s reading abilities based on the identified text. It was an effective means of determining the depth and initial starting point for the student. It involved leveled sentences as well as passages for determining the reading level of the child. In addition, it was also essential towards directing focus on the literal recall of the student as a means for assessment of comprehension capabilities (Fountas & Pinnell, 2009). The student illustrated medium literal recall capacity, which may be associated with the relatively high interest amongst Grade 3 children in the Harry Potter series. In addition, the student illustrated exceptional capacity in retelling the narrative that was provided within the text, which illustrated continued development in literal skills, primarily in comprehension capability.

Furthermore, the student was able to make educated guesses related to the cues continued in the narrative, which was assisted by his relatively high interest in the theme and narrative (Hipsky, 2010). He utilized common strategies such as using the storyline to source for clues, verifying ideas from text in responding to questions, making connections of the themes contained in the text to real life, illustrates inflection, uses context and picture clues to derive meanings from the text. In addition, the student was able to recognize that the text belonged to fictional genre, which was aided by interactions with other students to discuss the meaning of the text.

Moreover, the student was capable of identifying the various elements of text such as the setting, themes, mood, social views, moral, symbolism, the purpose of the author, tensions, and character (Hipsky, 2010). The student identified the different contexts provided in the narration, which he primarily associated with the various characters. From such settings, the student was able to identify the themes and moral associated with the narrative. The student noted of the fight between evil and good, which he was able to correlate with the characters identified in the text namely Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy, Ron Weasley and others. The student is able to make associations between the expected conduct of the different characters, which is influenced by issues such as social status and their presumed destiny according to the plot of the text (Rowling & GrandPré, 2005).

In addition, the assessment also included oral reading analyses to understand the oral reading process and capabilities of the identified student. It was an effective platform for recording the progress and reading strategies of the student, which may form the basis for subsequent instruction. Recording the student’s progress was not a challenging task, since it was only focused on a single student (Fountas & Pinnell, 2009). The oral reading analysis was critical towards provision of in-depth information about the strategies and skills utilized by the reader in approaching authentic texts. In addition, it was a means for becoming sensitized to the needs of the student and becoming an effective listener such as it becomes possible to analyze the high nuanced elements of the reading activity.

Think Aloud remains critical to reading compression instruction so it provides a means of demonstrating comprehension strategies to the students such as inferring, visualizing and summarizing of the elements gained from the text (Fountas & Pinnell, 2009). This practice formed a critical part of the assessment as it enabled me to transfer new skills and knowledge to the student on effective means of understanding text and recollection of information contained in a particular text. The interview was able to ensure that the student was free to share their individual perspectives on the themes and ideas shared in the selected text.

The interview provided an effective means towards understanding the critical nature of individualized instruction as it provides a means of understanding the diverse needs, expectations, capabilities, and skill sets of students in modern classrooms (Fountas & Pinnell, 2009). The interview also highlighted the important for developing assessments that are centered on the needs of the students, and focus on ensuring that students are able to gain new insights on strategies that they can utilize to enhance their skills. Furthermore, it emerged of the need for the student to be provided with an incremental exposure to text to improve fluency and comprehension of long texts.

References

Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (2009). The Fountas & Pinnell prompting guide 1: A tool for literacy teachers : teach, prompt, reinforce. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Hindley, J. (1996). In the company of children. York, Me: Stenhouse Publishers.

Hipsky, S. (2010). Differentiated literacy and language arts strategies for the elementary classroom. Boston: Pearson.

Rowling, J. K., & GrandPré, M. (2005). Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. New York, NY: Arthur A. Levine Books.