Formative Think Aloud Case Study

In recent years, it has been revealed by many studies that teachers are intimidated when it comes to teaching proper reading strategies for students to best comprehend multiple texts; whether that be in or out of school. As many educators focus on state standards that must be taught as well as information students must extract from text/trade books, many teachers forget that we, the educators of today, must educate our students how to properly read various texts in order to extract necessary information in all content areas in order to flourish in one’s education. As a future educator I would like to know, are there any effective strategies that are designed to foster students in monitoring their reading comprehension and helpful for to teachers
to implement in their classrooms?
To further investigate this question I will create a case study on an individual student that ranges from either age six to eight.
First, I will conduct a formative think-aloud assessment that will evaluate the student’s beginning awareness of monitoring comprehension, then instruct the student in a strategic mini lesson that adapts strategies that will support reading comprehension. Afterwards, I will assess and evaluate the student in another think-aloud assessment to see if he/she showed any signs of improvement or were possibly able to adapt any certain learned strategies from the mini lesson to assist in their understanding of the given reading. My overall goal for this study is to adapt the student to use beneficial strategies that can assist in improving their thought process while reading. What I hope to accomplish in this case study is that the student will be able to advance their ability to monitor their own comprehension while reading different
texts.
Through this case study, I hypothesize that when assessing the participant’s reading comprehension skills, the first time around, results will show that the student is either moderate or below average in their level of comprehension.
I predict this due to the participant’s academic level ranging from either grades first to third; with the necessary participant needed for this case study being so young and only having two to four years of school under their belt, he/she will have only a small amount of skills learned thus far in their spectrum of learning towards their ability to read as well as in academic schemes. Then, when conducting the mini lesson I foresee that the student will be disinterested and lack some attention towards instruction as younger students are noted to be difficult to teach if taught longer than ten to fifteen minutes. However, to prevent this possibility from happening I will give two small brain breaks that last an hour and half between the three sessions to allow the participant to ease his/her mind before coming back into the next sitting. By doing so, I find that this structure will be beneficial to increase the students productivity as well as their ability to retain new information from the mini lesson. Lastly, as it comes to the final assessment of the case study, I expect to see pronounced improvement within the participant’s results of their ability to monitor their comprehension. I say this for the reason that the mini lesson implements
teacher modeling and the learning of several strategies; through both these activities the student will be exposed to multiple examples of both individual and hands on learning to involve learning through all senses. Overall, I predict that this study will be able to identify, analyze, and assist greatly in the student’s development of understanding what he/she reads at any given time.