EDUC 622 Ethan's Case Study-- Interventions-- A Isaacs

ETHAN’S CASE STUDY 1 Case Study of Ethan Smith: Recommended Interventions Based on Best Practices in Reading Instruction for Middle Schoolers Adrienne Isaacs School of Education, Liberty University Author Note Adrienne Isaacs, LUID: L31540624

ETHAN’S CASE STUDY 2 I have no known conflict of interest to disclose. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Adrienne Isaacs, Email: acisaacs@liberty.edu

ETHAN’S CASE STUDY 4 night in order to complete his homework assignments. Not only did Ethan struggle to break words into parts, but he was also a slow reader in general. He also had difficulty sounding the written words out. Based on his mother’s account, Ethan is struggling with segmenting and phonics. What are the student’s weaknesses in reading as identified from the graph? Correct Word Student Pronunciation Highlight the area that is incorrect. Analysis (Vowels, Consonants, Beginning, Middle, End Sounds, etc.) Comments comm anders Ending, substitution Comrades comm anders Ending, substitution Discussions discus ses Ending, substitution Concerning c anearing Middle, vowels substitution & consonant omission An The Substitution of another common small sight word Intricate in dercator Ending, substitution Wished wishe s Ending, substitution of another common ending To It Substitution of another common small sight word Cracker Crac k Ending, omission Based on the following chart and graph:

ETHAN’S CASE STUDY 5 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 80 68 83 80 83 65 80 79 76 81 87 ORF for Ethan Smith 1st Scenario NUMBER OF ORF WCPM Even after ten weeks of Tier II intervention, Ethan continues to read very slowly thus lowering his words correct per minute, or to misread several words, thereby also lowering the words correctly read per minute (WCPM). The data in the miscue analysis indicates that Ethan is misreading words at the ending of the word. For example, he recognized the ending -ing in the word “concerning”. However, in other words he substituted other common endings “-es” for the correct ending “-ions” (“ discusses ” instead of “ discussions ”), and the ending “-s” instead of the correct ending “-ed” (“ wishes ” instead of “ wished ”). In two words with the same beginning, Ethan substituted the same ending to those words, perhaps due to his familiarity with the vocabulary word “commanders”. All of the above indicate that Ethan is routinely not decoding the ends of words. How do these data correlate? Both the feedback from Ethan’s mother and the data in the chart and graph support that Ethan is struggling with segmenting words into parts. The chart and graph support that he recognizes the beginning of words, but then does not decode the endings. Therefore, he has a lower number of

ETHAN’S CASE STUDY 7 Ethan exhibits difficulty identifying and decoding suffixes. According to Engaging Struggling Adolescent Readers to Improve Reading Skills (Donovan et al, 2017) “adequate skills in decoding, morphosyntax, and sentence structure are critical for making meaning from text. Morphological analysis skills, such as the ability to recognize adjectival and nominalizing suffixes, are important for assigning syntactic roles to keywords, a process that effects readers’ ability to extract literal propositions from the text and construct a comprehensive textbase” (Donovan, et al., 2017, pg. 385). In other words, Ethan’s difficulty in recognizing significant endings on words diminishes his ability to understand the implications of those words within the context of the sentence, therefore deteriorating his understanding of the text as a whole. However, for his age and grade level, simply focusing on the reading subskill of decoding suffixes will not adequately assist him in understanding 7 th grade reading passages. In the article, Engaging Struggling Adolescent Readers to Improve Reading Skills , Donovan goes on to explain that “improvements in reading subskills, however, are not sufficient for deep comprehension. Effective interventions needs to expose adolescents to texts and reading tasks that are complex and open ended enough to support sophisticated reading. In most intervention programs, component skills are practiced in isolation, without applications to challenging and motivating content” (Donovan et al, 2017, pg. 385). Therefore, although Ethan requires intervention specifically in the subskill of phonics, an age-appropriate intervention would integrate his phonics practice into challenging and motivating tests that would hep him to transfer phonological skills to general 7 th grade academic reading and comprehension-related tasks. Subsequently, the STARI approach would be an age-appropriate intervention for Ethan, instead of isolated practice on suffixes. With STARI instruction, St rategic A dolescent R eading I ntervention, a teacher can use the intervention to improve Ethan’s decoding skills and reading fluency. Using STARI instruction, the teacher would have Ethan and a partner

ETHAN’S CASE STUDY 8 student time each other “during repeated reading of short topical passages linked to unit themes. Words with spelling patterns taught in decoding and morphological analysis lessons [would be] loaded into the fluency passages to provide repeated exposure to challenging words.” Then, to reinforce the fluency practice and connect it to higher reasoning skills appropriate for the 7 th grade, STARI applies the fluency passage to a comprehension and discussion task. “For example, after reading a fluency passage about restricted combat roles for women during the Iraq War, students recorded their own opinions on the policy and then compared views with their fluency partner” (Donovan et al, 2017, pg. 366). Furthermore, an intervention that increases fluency while also focusing on comprehension is also important. As noted by Guerin and Murphy, “fluency involves more than simply fast oral reading” (Guerin & Murphy, 2015, pg. 552). Although in Ethan’s Tier II interventions, the teacher measured words read correctly per minute, such measurements result in the “privileging of speeded decoding” in fluency instruction without “regard for meaning” (Guerin & Murphy, 2015, pg. 552). Instead, “prosody should be assessed as a part of a comprehensive approach to fluency assessment” because there is a “strong correlation between oral reading prosody and silent reading comprehension.” (Guerin & Murphy, 2015, pg.552) This relationship is because oral prosody-- pitch rate, inflection, stress—are all indications of the reader’s understanding of the text. It goes beyond rapid decoding to a deeper connection with the text. Repeated Reading (RR) is an intervention seen as a “valuable instructional method for struggling adolescent readers” (Guerin & Murphy, 2015, pg. 553). Repeated reading, as utilized by Guerin and Murphy, involves rereading the same passage until wholistic fluency is attained-- intonation, stress, cadence and rate indicating understanding. In the research of Guerin and Murphy, an FSS (Fluency Scoring Sheet) was used for students to set goals for improvement and then self-assess improvement. Students used a scaled rating to rate themselves before and after RR (repeated

ETHAN’S CASE STUDY 10 The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA, 1998) and Multidimensional Fluency Scale (MDFS, 2012) were utilized in the research presented in Repeated Reading as a Method to Improve Reading Fluency for Struggling Adolescent Readers (Geurin & Murphy, 2015). However, the NARA is designed for assessing students up to age 12. Guerin and Murphy used the assessment with students ages 13 and 14, so it can be used, however it is not as valid since it is outside of its intended age range. Since Ethan Smith is 13 years old, the MDFS would still be appropriate. As an alternative to the NARA, the Woodcock-Johnson III Reading Fluency subtest can be used by the teacher assessing Ethan to progress monitor his response to interventions. The Woodcock-Johnson uses timed sentence verification method to assess the students rate of reading and comprehension by finding “the number of correct answers within a given time period” (Denton et al, 2011). The Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension (TOSREC; Wagner, Torgesen, Rashotte, & Pearson, 2010 ) can also be used to progress monitor. These measures would be preferable over oral reading fluency (ORF) measurements because “In general, for middle school students, vocabulary tasks may be better predictors of comprehension than timed oral reading.” Studies have found that “both vocabulary and fluency were significant predictors of comprehension at all grade levels but that the relative importance of ORF decreased in the higher grades.” (Denton et al, 2011) Since students in middle school are more often asked to complete silent reading tasks, it is important that Ethan’s interventions assist him in transferring his reading skills into silent reading tasks. Therefore assessments of silent reading comprehension would be better measurements that would contribute to age-appropriate success.

ETHAN’S CASE STUDY 11 References Denton, C. A., Barth, A. E., Fletcher, J. M., Wexler, J., Vaughn, S., Cirino, P. T., Romain, M., & Francis, D. J. (2011). The relations among oral and silent reading fluency and comprehension in middle school: Implications for identification and instruction of students with reading difficulties. Scientific studies of reading : the official journal of the society for the scientific study of reading , 15 (2), 109–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888431003623546 Donovan, S., Hemphill, L., Jones, S., Kim, J. S., LaRusso, M., Thomson, J. M., & Troyer, M. (2017). Engaging struggling adolescent readers to improve reading skills. Reading Research Quarterly , 52 (3), 357–382. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26622571 Guerin, A., & Murphy, B. (2015). Repeated reading as a method to improve reading fluency for struggling adolescent readers. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , 58 (7), 551–560. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44011179