Real Life Reading Inquiry

      For my real life reading inquiry I took one of my dance students (the daughter of one of my co-workers) who is a rising second grader and assessed her reading fluency in relation to different leveled books. Emma's mother told me that she was a very advanced reader for her age, so I wanted to assess how true that was based on her fluency for her grade level. I checked out three books from the UT library that varied in their reading difficulty. I chose:

1) The Penguin and the Pea by Janet Perlman - an estimated grade level (EGL) 5.6

2) The Princess Test by Gail Carson Levine - EGL 4.0

3) Junie B., First Grader, Dumb Bunny, by Barbara Park - EGL 3.0

     Next, I counted out the number of words in the beginning passages of each book. The Penguin and the Pea had 113 words I would be testing her on, The Princess Test had 100 and Junie B, First Grader, Dumb Bunny had 120 words. I knew from a rubric online that in the second grade she should be reading at 55-79 words per minute for a book at her grade level. (I realize that I didn't actually find a book at her age level.) While she read the passages aloud to me, I timed her and then calculated her average words per minute (WPM). After she completed the passages I asked her open ended questions about the text to see how much she comprehended as well. 

      I found that for The Penguin she read around 33 WPM, The Princess she read 38 WPM, and Junie B.,  she read 50 WPM. To be completely honest, my results really confused me. I don't know how it's supposed to work to assess a student's capabilities at reading level higher than her own, and so I had a hard time telling if she was actually advanced. If I am looking at WPM alone, there is a clear decline in the number of words she can read as reading difficulty goes up. However, it's hard to tell if this indicates an advanced level of reading or not. All in all, I did realize that if I want to assess her true reading ability, I should have stuck to her grade level books. 

       While she was reading I was able to draw connections to some of the readings we did in class. Firstly, the fluency article "Creating Fluent Readers" very adeptly lays out what we need to be looking for in fluency. Emma had very high accuracy in word decoding - she hardly ever had a major pronounciation problem when sounding out new words. Her automatic processing was what I thought to be more advanced because she seemed to be focusing on the story more than the difficulty of reading (at least for the Junie B book). Finally, her prosodic reading was what I thought needed the most help. Of course, for an incoming second grader to be able to have high prosody would be an accomplishment. I also tried to use the "How else can I say sound-it-out?" when she became stumped on a word. I found that Emma is excellent at "chunking" which shows me that she has a high sight-word bank under her belt. 

       Overall the real life reading inquiry made me realize how much more complicated the teaching-reading process is going to be. I almost panicked when I realized these books would be way too hard for her because I initially thought it would be a good idea - but I had to keep my calm and act like it was all part of the plan. I definitely learned from it!

Emma with her Junie B. book!