The thing that sticks out most from the readings this week was the chapter dedicated to educational and noneducational factors that could affect a student's reading performance. A few of the situations that were mentioned are things that I am currently noticing in my new school. I did my student teaching in Jones County, GA where there wasn't much parent envolvement and I had a high population of low socioeconomic level students. While I was doing my student teaching, sometimes the students would not get their homework done or wouldn't get certain assignments signed because their parents weren't around to help them and they simply did not have the needed support. There also did not seem to be much discipline on the parents end after hearing of something that happened while the child was at school. On the complete other side of the spectrum, I am not teaching in a Forsyth County, GA school where I have a volunteer list that seems to be never ending. The parents want to come in all the time to help with small groups, and are even offering to help me do creative things with my lesson plans. The students always have their homework and have their agendas signed nightly. The parents are in constant contact with me about how their child is doing and how they can help them succeed in the classroom (some even asking for extra work for their child to complete at home). If something happens in the classroom, the parents are sure to discuss the consequences when the student gets home after school. With that said, I can tell a significant different in their reading levels. The majority of the students in my classroom are reading above level books, while 80% of the students at my old school were reading on middle of second grade levels- some were even reading on a first grade level.
However, the book also states that reading level could have to do with environmental factors as well as the teacher's noticible perceptions of specific subjects and their methods of teaching. Of course if the children do not have adequate access to appropriate books as home and do not have the support needed for specific activities then they are not going to do as well as they could with their reading abilities. But if the children also have a teacher who doesn't like to teach reading and does not continue to improve their own reading abilities then the child does not have a good "reading role model". Children can only do as much as they are taught, experience or observe, so if the child is not becoming a part of or seeing reading done on the level we expect of them then they will not reach their full potential.
I have a student who is new to the school this year, and I had begun to notice that something did not seem to be connecting with her. I was always having to redirect her on specific assignments and ask her to go back and complete specific questions. So, I went back and looked and her pretests for math and reading. She skipped the majority of the word problems for math and did not even complete her reading pretest. So, I then went to look at the rest of her tests that she took recently. She did the same thing on those- skipped the word problems. I began to put the pieces together and realized that I needed to do some further testing. I did a reading test on her to find her reading level, and she tested in the 10% for reading fluency and the 12% for reading comprehension. When she reads, she reads letter by letter so she is unable to absorb the content and therefore comprehend the material. After looking over table 1.1 on page 8 in "Reading Diagnosis and Improvement" I now see that she exhibits the majority of the characteristics for a less proficient reader. From here, I will be implementing new reading techniques for her specifically such as allowing her to experience other ways of reading aside from the typical sound it out routine.
No comments:
Post a Comment