>> Debbie Morbitt: Today we're going to talk about running
records. Before viewing this particular analysis make sure that
you have listened to the child on the running record at the
farm. If you need more practice feel free to go ahead and just
listen and make your own markings and then compare them
when you get to the analysis. Running records comes from
Murray Clay's text, An Observation Survey.
There are many reasons that we take running records. We're
looking to see what the student does well, what they struggle
with, and also what we want to do in future instruction. This
will tell us the strategies, specific strategies that we want to teach.
Whether that be fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, or
words study. We want to make sure we determine the
appropriate level for the student. Remember that we want to
work with a student in instructional level between 90 and 94 percent.
Below 90 percent is perceived as difficult. And above
95 percent is perceived as easy. We use this information to
monitor the progress of the students and your class as a whole.
Evaluate progress and also for grouping. When we think about
grouping don't just think about the level the particular student
is reading at. It may be for a mini lesson on vocabulary, or
something specific with blends. Or a fluency strategy that you
want to review with several of your students.
The student that we're going to analyze today is a boy, he's in
kindergarten, and he's aged 6 years and 6 months.
Let's go ahead and take a look at his running record at the farm.
Okay, so now we're going to look at the recordings that we made
while the child was reading at the farm. I have a form here that
already has the words printed out on it. It makes it easier for
you to keep track and to follow along with the student.
But you're perfectly welcome to use the blank form as well.
Okay, so let's go ahead and look on the first page that the child read.
He read all of those words correctly. A cat is at the farm.
But when we got to the next page, he started to struggle a little bit.
The first word in that sentence is 'and'. He kind of stumbled
with that, with a- a- aten. And wasn't sure what that was, kind
of hesitated a little bit, and so what I went ahead and did is tell
him the word after I thought he took long enough tot take care
of that. So we have 'and' and then we put what the child said
right above that. And you'll see the 't' with it circled, which
means that I told the child what that word was. He got the
word 'a' correct, and then when he got to little he just said I
don't know that word. And then working through, taking some
sounds, he was able to look at each of the letters and
phonemically sound it out, but he still struggled a little bit too
much with that and looked for me to help, so I also had to, at that
point, tell him the word 'little' as well.
Now so when we come over here to this side, we have two
errors. We also have to mark for our M S and V, meaning,
syntax, and visual. So let's look at our first word-that's 'and'.
And he really didn't say a word for a substitution, and the word
had to be told. So for meaning and syntax, it's not going to
apply at all, because there was no word stated. But for visual
information, we can give him credit for that, because he was
looking at the word and trying to come up with that. So I'm
going to mark that word positive for visual, and I'm just going
to put a little check mark there. And then when we got to
'little', again he started to look at the word and started to
sound that out. So he was using visual information a little bit
there, but I didn't mark it down so we'll pass on the visual for
that particular word. Alright, so let's continue. A dog is at the
farm, and, at, little puppy is at the farm too.
So let's go ahead and mark our line here. He substituted 'at' for
the word 'a'. Now, let's go ahead. We have over here, we want
to make sure that we mark it for an error, and we're going to
have to talk about our m, s, and v. Again, we look at the error
and we say, up to and including the error for meaning, does it
make sense. Does this make sense to what's going on in the
story? And he says, and, at, it's not really making a whole lot of
sense, we don't really know what he's talking about, we don't
really have enough information for him to be using meaning at
this point in the error. But now let's look at syntax. Is it proper
grammar? Can you say this in English? These are really
important things to look at when you're considering syntax.
And, at. Remember, we don't go past the error. But and at is not
going to be proper either. So syntax is not going to be marked
positive. At. Do we want to mark it positive for visual
information? Remember, visual isn't the picture. Visual is the
word. Is the word similarly visual in the word and the error
that it's supposed to be. Here, yes, they're very similar, they're
both function words, they both start with a and a, so let's go
ahead and mark that for visual.
Notice so far the child has three errors and everything could be
marked for visual information. Alright, now on to our next
page. A duck is at the farm. Notice that I made notation here
that the child used a picture. It's really important for you to
write notes, so you don't forget those items when you're going
back to look at the analysis. You're not going to remember if
you're taking multiple running records, or you may not get to it
until a day or two after you've taken the running record. So I
went ahead and said that he did use the picture when reading
that page. Now, let's go ahead and continue. Interestingly
enough, he started to struggle again with the word 'and'. But
now he's coming up with more words and substitutions, a, the,
at. Those are all meaningful substitutions for the word 'and'. So
I'm going to go ahead for my one error there, actually I have
two errors in total, so let's go ahead and mark for our first one
that he did use meaning for that. How about syntax? Well, we
can start sentences with a, the, or at, so at that point we can
mark it positive for syntax. Just be really careful, because this
information isn't really telling you a whole lot, because he's
substituting a function word-- a, that, at-- and he's doing it at the beginning
of a sentence. So we're going to look at patterns when we get to
the end of this. Did we see a lot of patterns? I did happen to see
that he struggles a little with the word 'and'. I'm not certain that
he doesn't know the word, I think he just kind of struggles
when he gets to it at the beginning of a page. But now let's look
at 'duck'. Interestingly enough, this is where schema may come
into play. Is he even familiar with what a baby duck is called?
Because a baby duck is called a duckling.
If he doesn't have that in his schema, he's not going to come up
with that word unless he works through that phonemically.
And he also is in kindergarten, so you know, we're not sure
metacognitively if he's even paying attention to that suffix
there. But he came up with 'duck'. Let's look at the m, s, v for
that. Meaning-does it make sense? Yes, it does. Remember, up
to and including the error. He's talking about a duck, we know
that there's a duck on the page, so we're going to mark that
positive for meaning. How about syntax, can we say that? Yes.
And a little duck, we're positive again, and we're definitely
positive for visual information. So this time, he really nailed all
three of the meaning, syntax, and visual. Let's go down to the
next part, where he starts to talk about the pig and the piglet.
So the sentence says, the pig is at the farm. He substituted
piglet for pig, remember he substituted duck for duckling, so
maybe he knows that the baby pig is a piglet, but maybe he
self-corrected, which is great because he noticed that maybe he
was talking about a baby pig or what we hope is that he was
looking at the word and noticed that the word was too short at
pig to be piglet. But let's look at self-correction. So we have one
over here. Again, if you think about the errors that we've had
so far, we've had five errors and this is our first self-correction.
And so piglet for pig, was he using meaning at this point to
change the piglet for pig. I think, absolutely, because there's a
baby pig there. So we're going to mark it positive for meaning.
How about syntax? Is it properly spoken in English? The piglet,
the pig. Yes, we're doing that. He went ahead and substituted.
And definitely visual information. So once again we have all
three going to work for him metacognitively when he makes
his self-correction. And we finish up with 'and the little piglet is
at the farm too.' Let's go ahead and mark what we had here. We
had the 5 and the 1. So we know when we figure our accuracy
rate, our errors and self-corrections, we can do that correctly. I
want to keep going on because we have this great chart here
that kind of cheats for us, so we don't have to figure it out
mathematically. But we know that he made five errors, which
puts him in the 92 percentile. We also know that the
instructional stage is between 90 and 94, so he's right on with
that. His fluency was okay, I might want to look with him at
doing some other things with fluency and just keeping the flow,
maybe some repeated reading, but I wasn't disturbed by the
fluency as much as some other things that came out, and we'll
see that as we get to the comprehension questions. Self-
correction ratio. Remember that he had one self-correction, his
errors were 5, his self-correction was 1, so that's a total of 6, so
then you divide that by your self-corrections, and you get a 1 to 6 ratio.
We want to see that, we want to see that come up a little bit.
We want to see a 1 to 2 or 1 to 3 ratio on our self-corrections.
So that's something we want to start working with him on,
going back and fixing those errors that he had. Alright, let's
look at some of the comprehension questions and how he was
able to answer those. I made a lot of notes here just because I
was kind of following along with what he said. He really wasn't
that forthright on giving us a whole lot of information. I kind of
had to pull a lot from him. Could be for a couple reasons. He's not in my class,
so I don't know how much experience he has with a lot of comprehension.
I definitely want to get him in some discussion groups so he can
work with comprehension and have those discussions with
other students and myself, so we can talk about those things
and he can share even more about what he's learning in the
story. Alright, so let's look at some of the answers that he gave
us for the comprehension. We wanted him to be able to give us
3 or 4 examples for the animals, such as dogs, pigs, cats, ducks.
We also wanted him to tell us that they're big and little
animals, perhaps he could say that they're adult and baby
animals. What was he able to tell us? He could tell us some of
the animals. He also told us what they're called when they're
little. Remember, he struggled with that duck and duckling, pig
and piglet. You know, before you read a book like that, you
might want to have a conversation and talk to the student, a
little pre-reading exercise. What do they know about farms?
What do they know about animals? Why are we looking at this
to begin with? Are we doing a unit on animals or on farms?
So we want to build up that schema as much as possible so he's successful.
He also told us that the big animals were the real name and the
little animals were the other name, which I thought was very
cute, especially coming from a kindergartener. I gave him a 2
for a score. I thought he did pretty well, I just wanted him to
give us a little bit more specific information. Let's go down to
the other one, where it's beyond the text. We've moved beyond
what we can find actually in the book. Now it's what's going on,
what is he thinking about when he's reading this story, and
what kind of connections can he make to his own life and to
information that he knows, or perhaps to other texts or books
or experiences. This is where I'm also going to look for him to
talk about other animals that maybe weren't in the story. Big
animals being the parents, or that the little ones are the babies,
and actually ask him, what does this remind you of? He really
struggled here. He wasn't able to give me a whole lot of
information that I was looking for, and when I asked him about
things, he talked about cow babies, horse babies, baby
chickens, but he wasn't quite sure what was going on. So I gave
him a 1, because he did come up with some information, but I
didn't feel like he was confident with any of the beyond-the-
text information. So I want to make sure when I'm looking at
comprehension that he's got what's right there in front of him
and can look at it, but he doesn't necessarily have it beyond
that point. And so he only received a 3 out of 6, and that's not
going to be anything where I want him to go. In fact, it really
puts us down into the unsatisfactory comprehension. So that's
really something that we need to make sure that we can take
care of later on.
Let's look at some notations that I've made on a blank form.
Remember, I said at the beginning that if you want to practice,
practicing on a blank form is perfectly fine. I like having the
text-it refreshes my memory and also let's me follow along.
But either one is appropriate. Notice that I put under
instructional, 'at the farm', 5 out of 60. 60 were the running words.
It was a 92% accuracy rate, and he had a self-correction rate of 1 to 6.
We actually talked about that in the previous slide.
Let's go down, because I did make some notations here. During
my instruction on the analysis of errors and self-corrections, I
said he really, really tries to work through the sounds but it
doesn't really help him yet. So that's something that I want to
concentrate with him. He does have self-correction but it's very
very low. He primarily uses visual information, with some
meaning mixed in. And a little attention to syntax. It was a little
hard to tell because a lot of the errors were at the beginning of the sentence.
A couple other notations that I made-he said, I don't know
what this is. Now, at that point I want to prompt him, you try
and figure that out. You try the word. And that did help him a
little bit. It didn't get him to the point where he was able to tell
the words successfully, but at least he started to work through
those, so that's a great step in the right direction and we want
to keep him moving along that path. You'll notice that I started
marking my m, s, and v here, and my errors, and I did that
throughout this particular form. Now, you don't have to do
both forms. One or the other is correct. I just wanted to show
you the options of each of these forms, just in case you were
interested in doing one over the other. Okay, so now we looked
at the analysis, we looked at the running record forms. Let's go
ahead and look at some of the implications for instruction.
Alright, so our teaching implications. Sight word vocabulary.
Using word walls. I think this would be extremely helpful for
this child. He can see these words over and over again. But I
want him to build his own sight word vocabulary and his own
word wall, to let him play around with those. I may have one in
the classroom, but there's no reason that he can't add his own
words or have a small word wall for a particular book that he's reading.
Pre-reading activities-we talked about this a little bit about
this before. Animals and their babies. We can do some
brainstorming. We can always do some KWL, even at the
kindergarten stage. We can do it with words, we can do some
scribed words, we can also use pictures. We can also do what I
want to know and what I've learned, after he's done. It also
adds to his vocabulary information. Go back, add it to the word
wall. These all layer on top of each other and can be used in
conjunction. Comprehension-this is really the area that I want
to concentrate on with him. Remember he was in the book at
that level. In the book type of comprehension questions. He
could be sufficient with that. But beyond the text, he struggled
with that. I want to make sure I use a lot of questions that get
him to think beyond the text that he's reading. He's unable to
expand pass the basic in the book information, and he had
some familiarity with the farms in the background knowledge,
and that allowed him to list some of the other animals.
Discussion-we talked about this too. I want to use discussion
with his comprehension with other students and with myself,
and predict what type of animals might be in the story before
we read and discuss the names of their babies.
And let's wrap it up with some writing activities. There's no
reason that he can't start writing some books of his own.
Maybe there are baby animals and the adults, maybe there are
ones that are at the farm, maybe there's ones that are in his
neighborhood, or even that he has at home. So go ahead and
feel free to add to this list, but I think that these are the items
that I would concentrate on for teaching implications.
Remember why we're doing running records. Also, if you need
further practice, listen to the audio, go through that, listen to
the analysis, and see how you come out with your running records
and the children that you're working with.