Reader Assessment Summary

Reader: Riley
Grade: 3rd
Tutor: Riley O’Brien
Date: 9 May 2018

Quantitative Summary:

Identify how the reader performed with a grade level text:

The grade-level text I assessed Riley on was a level 23 text titles Giraffes. Based on his scores
for accuracy and comprehension, this text would be an Independent Level text for Riley. His
reading accuracy was 96% (independent), and his self-correction rate was 1:9. His words correct
per minute was 77 words, which falls below the 50th percentile.

Qualitative Summary:

At grade level:

Riley made a total of 8 errors while reading this text, most of them being insertions or omissions.
The substitutions, insertions, and omissions that Riley made while reading this text did not
disrupt the syntactic sentence structure or the meaning of the text in any way. For example,
instead of reading “A fully grown giraffe is three times taller,” Riley read “A fully grown giraffe
is almost three times taller.” This insertion of the word almost did not disrupt the text or its
meaning in a way that would make it difficult to understand or comprehend. In another example,
Riley read “To reach the water, giraffes have to spread their long legs apart…” instead of what
was actually written in the text, which stated, “To reach the water, giraffes have to spread their
long legs far apart.” The omission of this word did not disrupt the meaning of the sentence
either, along with Riley’s understanding of the text. Although Riley made a few errors, the errors
he made did not have negative impacts on his understanding of the information in the text and
how he was comprehending it.

I would rate Riley’s overall fluency a 3 out of 4 on the Scale for Assessing Fluency. Riley reads
with great expression, and his intonation tends to vary depending on the nature of the text. The
rate that he reads is about an average pace, but if he comes across a difficult word or phrase he
will occasionally slow down to think about what is written on the page. Most of the time, he
pauses at punctuation marks, but will sometimes ignore them and create run-on sentences when
he reads.

When retelling what he read in this Grade-Level Text, Riley was able to recall 6 out of 12 details
on the Retelling Response Sheet. He remembered that giraffes live in Africa, that they are the
tallest animals in the world, that they have two horns on their heads, what they eat, and that lions
wait for them at the watering hole. Riley was very detailed when recalling these pieces of
information, but was unable to recall any other details on this page. In the Comprehension
Check, Riley answered 5 out of 5 questions correct. He answered the literal questions with
confidence, and gave insightful answers for the inferential questions. For example, when asked
why animals should be careful when drinking at a waterhole, he said that they “never know when
a predator is going to be there.” Because Riley’s retelling score fell within the Frustration Level,
but his Comprehension Check was more than acceptable, I decided to combine the two scores
and determined that Riley’s comprehension at this grade-level text was instructional.

Reader Summary:

Riley was very motivated and eager to read this text. Before we began reading, he started to tell
me about how giraffes treat their young, demonstrating his level of prior knowledge about the
topic of the text. He didn’t seem to have any trouble with the vocabulary of the text, and didn’t
ask me to define what any words meant or to tell him what any words said. He approached the
reading, retelling, and comprehension tasks with focus and engagement, which made a positive
impact on the results of the assessment.

Unfortunately, I was unable to administer a first assessment to Riley at the beginning of the
semester because we only started working together a few weeks ago. However, I have been able
to monitor his progress over the course of the last few weeks. Compared to when we first started
working together, Riley has begun to take his time while he reads to really think about the text
and the meaning of the words. In this assessment, it was clear that he was monitoring his reading
because when he made an error or had a hard time pronouncing a word or phrase, he would
repeat that section of the text until it made sense to him. My goal for my first reader, as well as
Riley, was to build comprehension skills, which is something that Riley has been able to do by
practicing the various comprehension strategies we’ve worked on in the short time we’ve had
together.