Kelsey Olson

Adv. Curriculum & Instruction Diverse Learner

Case Study- Section V
December 6, 2014
V. Post- Instruction Results
The main post-instruction assessment that I gave to Sara was for her second IEP progress
report and assessed her progress towards her one reading comprehension goal. Sara did
excellent on this assessment and correctly answered ten out of eleven questions. For the
assessment, Sara was asked to read a third grade level story that was written in letter format
aloud to me. She did very well and only mis-read a few words that were mostly non-essential
towards comprehending the story. The following twelve multiple-choice questions she answered
independently and was not required to read aloud. Sara correctly identified the main idea and the
authors purpose as well as correctly answered an inference and prediction question. I feel that
this showed Saras strong understanding of the context of the letter that she read, which is an
improvement from the beginning of the year when she often struggled to understand the main
ideas of 2nd and 3rd grade leveled text. I believe that Saras continued practice of slowing down as
she reads with me as well as our practice in monitoring her comprehension through stopping to
talk about the text often both have helped her better understand the big ideas of stories.
The first question Sara answered incorrectly asked her to determine what the word
annually means. She selected: happening once a week. This question was supposed to assess
her ability to find a word meaning in context. Personally, I think this is a very challenging
question because the only clue in the story for this words meaning is mentioned in the following
paragraph. Using context clues for singular word meaning was not something that I specifically
focused on with Sara, but given this assessment, it might be a good idea instructionally for me in
the future to model instance where you need to use the whole text to determine word meaning,
rather than just the preceding or following sentence. In addition, I think a good next step
instructionally will be to provide Sara with more explicit vocabulary support for her reading. The
second question that Sara answered incorrectly asked her to select the fact from a list of four
possible answers. Sara selected, I have never seen so much food and the correct answer was
My youngest cousins are twins. The two other possible answers were clear opinions and I
think Sara exhibits her understanding of the difference between fact and opinion by not selecting
either of these answer choices. However, she did select the answer choice that was more of a
statement rather than the more clear fact. I think it could be helpful to review what constitutes a

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fact and instruct her that just because a statement is not a clear opinion, like saying something is
the best, does not mean that the statement is a fact. I do feel that this is a confusing question,
particularly for English language learners like Sara, because the option that she selected is
written very matter-of-factly. Although it may be clear to most students that that the writer is
exaggerating when he says that he has never seen this much food, the sentence ends with a
period rather than an exclamation mark. I feel that this change might have made it more obvious
to Sara that this sentence was likely an exaggeration. Overall, Sara did well on this assessment
though and I feel that she exhibited an improved skill level in reading comprehension.
From informal observations, throughout these past few months Sara has made improvements in
reading comprehension, has been a noticeably more careful reader, and has been able to spend
longer chunks of time working on writing-based activities. This progress is still contingent on
her being in a good mood and it usually helps if she has an adult working with her individually.
Generally Sara has been very dedicated when I have worked with her, which I believe is due in
large part to the one-on-one attention she is receiving. In addition, I believe that my own learning
has helped improve the work time I have spent with Sara. Realizing that I should provide her
with more support such as acting as a scribe on certain writing assignments or reading everyother page when she is working on a book-based project, has been a great way to help keep Sara
focused on the academic task rather than having her grow frustrated. I feel that continuing to
support Sara one-on-one, particularly while she is working on reading or writing, will be very
important in helping her academic growth.