Catwings: Passage Analysis

60%. Aidan was able to answer questions about features of lizards, such as their ability to peel off their skin and break their tails, but was unable to list types of reptiles or tell me why a reptile would behave in a certain way. This tells me that Aidan can answer questions that have one correct answer, but struggles to answer questions that can have multiple answers. The second passage I tested Aidan over was Catwings, which is a Level N. Aidan scored 94% on this passage, which means that it is on his instructional level. This means that Aidan makes frequent mistakes, but is still able to read the passage completely. On this story, Aidan’s main error was the use of syntactic clues. He would say a word that would work in the sentence,
To fix this error, Aidan needs to learn to cross-check this clue with the other two, in order to come up with a word that works in all three ways. Aidan’s fluency was lower on this passage, at 73 WPM, but was still within normal grade expectations. However, the increased difficulty of the passage did affect Aidan’s prosody. He read with less expression, as he was concentrating on what the word was and not on the story itself. His rate was lower as he had to pause more throughout the story to try and come up with the word. A reader on this level should be more fluent than Aidan was, however this is his instructional level so he is on target to reach this goal. To assess comprehension, I once again used questions. I asked Aidan the five questions that accompanied the passage. Aidan only answered two out of the five questions correctly. This resulted in a score of 20% for comprehension. Aidan was able to answer that the passage was fiction, and was able to answer one other question.
Aidan’s accuracy on this passage was 87%. This means that the book is on his frustrational level and is to hard for him to read at this point. He simply makes too many mistakes to derive any benefit from reading at this level at this point. On this passage, Aidan’s main error on the MSV scale was with visual clues. He would see that a word started with a certain letter and say a random word he knew started with that letter. Aidan did this 26 times throughout the passage. This shows that Aidan needs help learning how to look at the whole word, and on connecting these visual clues to meaning and syntactic clues. When working with Aidan, I will target this problem by asking, “Does that look right?” when he misreads a word due to visual error. Aidan’s fluency score on this passage was 56 WPM. This is very low and is barely within the third grade range. At this point in the semester, Aidan’s fluency should be higher according to grade level expectations. This low fluency helps indicate that the book is definitely frustrational for Aidan. While reading, Aidan lost almost all prosody, and read in a very jerky manner. He hesitated before many of the words, and had long pauses multiple times throughout the passage. This caused him to make even more mistakes, thus affecting his overall score. In order to assess comprehension over this passage, I chose to let Aidan do