Measuring the Reading Skills of a Student

Introduction Next door to where we live is a family with an 8-year-old boy who is in the third grade. He says that he does not like to read but that he has to for school and he hates it. “I don’t like reading in class.

It’s hard to say the words and everybody laughs at me.” I asked him if there was anything he enjoyed about reading and he said, “Yeah, when we can stop.” I decided to try a different route to see if I could get his participation any better and introduced the topic of comic books. “Do you like Batman or Spiderman?” I asked.

“Oh yeah!” So I offered him a few comic books to look at and he enjoyed them, but there was still the question of whether or not he was enjoying them because of the pictures or whether he was able to actually read them. When we discussed the story of the comic book it was apparent that he had not in fact read many of the panels but had instead skimmed them and looked instead at the pictures more than anything. I decided to try yet another route.

I asked the boy if he enjoyed listening to others read and he answered, “Yes.” I asked him if his teachers ever read any poetry to him and he said, “No.” I retrieved my book of poems by Shel Silverstein entitled A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends. I read aloud a few humorous poems that I thought he would enjoy and he followed along fairly well, laughing in the right spots and indicating that he understood what was being said.

Therefore, I decided to test using the selections from Fountas and Pinnell (2001)—specifically I wanted to assess the student’s ability in comprehension, fluent processing and level of text. I had the feeling that he was actually able to comprehend a lot more than his reading level might have indicated, especially if he struggled with reading but could follow along when someone else read.

Test Comprehension The boy’s comprehension was rather well when I read a poem to him: he was able to explain to me what the poem was about. I read a poem entitled “Nobody” by Silverstein, which plays on the concept of “nobody” actually being a person called “Nobody” rather than a non-entity. It could be a tricky poem, I thought, but the boy followed along and laughed when Nobody suddenly began to be personified as being an actual person.

I asked him why the poem was funny and he explained, “Because he says nobody loves him and at first you think it’s because he doesn’t have any friends but he’s actually talking about this person named Nobody so really somebody loves him named Nobody!” So he understood perfectly what the poem was reading. So next I wanted to test his fluency in reading.

Fluent Processing Liben and Paige (2016) state that “a full assessment of reading fluency includes consideration of the three indicators – accuracy, pacing, and prosody.” This aligns with Rasinski’s (2004) assessment recommendations.

Liben and Paige (2016) note that accuracy and pacing can be measured with a single metric called accumaticity, which they state “represents the total number of words read correctly during the assessment (the total number of words read minus those that were misread, omitted, or inserted, often called WCPM or CWPM).” The poem “Nobody” contains 140 words. I asked the boy to read it aloud to me. He read rather slowly and paused at virtually every other word.

Words that gave him difficulty were ones with double consonants, like “peaches” and “listens” and double vowels like “pears.” It was evident that he did not know how to sound out words or what sounds letter combinations made. His main difficulty was graphophonetic and with decoding words. The boy was simply not familiar with the sounds and did not have the patience to sit and make them out by himself.

It was rather difficult to actually count how many words he got correct because it took so long just for him to make out a single word. Even the word “nobody,” which is repeated constantly through the poem was difficult for him. Once he read it correctly the first time, I expected him to read it more easily the next several times—but each time it was as though he was reading it again for the first time.

He would stop and stare at it and try to sound it out and then realize a few moments later that he was reading the same word again. His visual recognition of letter cues was thus not very good. Level of Test To test his level of test I dropped him down all the way to the pre-K to K category and selected The Wonky Donkey from the Scholastic Book Wizard site.

This book was full of colorful images like in a coloring book and each page essentially had one sentence or line to it—and there was a lot of repetition. The boy basically demonstrated the same problems again with the words that he showed with the poem by Silverstein. Even when it was a repetition of words that he had already read, he struggled to recognize them each time.

I began to wonder if the boy was having a problem seeing the words or if he was suffering from a reading disorder such as dyslexia. I tested this by asking him to read a few words orally. He would say them allowed as though were reading reading them backwards, which can be a sign of dyslexia, as in cases like this the child processes the letters in reverse order. I made a note to discuss this with his parents so that they might like to have him tested professionally.

It occurred to me that something functionally was wrong with his approach to reading that was not a problem when it came to listening and comprehending what he was hearing. I also thought there might be a problem with his eyesight that could be exacerbating the problem. When a student struggles simply with seeing the letters this can aggravate the situation and make it seem like the child has a learning disability when it is actually just a physical impairment.

I observed him more closely as he was reading to see if he moved the book closer to his face to try to see. As far as I could tell, there were no indications of a problem physically.