Reading Intervention Tips

Howdy Friends,

I've teamed up with my amazing friend 

(and co-creator of our intervention binders) Ashley Benoit 

to bring you a post about running records and 

reading intervention.

Where do you begin?

The answer is simple: assessments. 

Teachers must know what areas students 

are struggling with so they can meet their needs 

effectively. 

Once you assess students, use the data to identify those students 

who are at risk. Then, be sure  to monitor their progress 

often. Struggling readers should be assessed at least bi-weekly, 

if not weekly.

After you’ve assessed the student, it’s important to analyze the running record. 

Score the accuracy and self-correction rates so you can determine if the text is at 

their independent, instructional, or frustration level.

Self-Correcting

A topic that we have been discussing at school recently has been self-correction rates.  Some teachers asked for guidance so I gave them some guidelines.  I also think that if a student has a 1:1 ratio but has more than 5 errors that were self-corrected the child is working way too hard. Analyze the errors and look at the information the student is neglecting.  Is it a weakness in decoding left to right, or a lack of high-frequency word vocabulary?  Address the weakness so the child becomes a more accurate and confident reader.

Self-Correction Rates

1:1 Excellent

1:2 Good

1:3 Fair

1:4 and higher show that the student isn’t monitoring consistently.

Is the student noticing that it doesn’t sound right, make sense, or look right?

Is the student self-correcting with only one source of information and ignoring the others?

The goal is to be flexible and to use all of the cues/information together. (Meaning-pictures, Structure-language, Visual-letters.)

Errors In Reading

Errors in reading are a common issue. It’s important to look for patterns with errors. Are students only having errors with proper nouns? Do they struggle with reading all the way through the word? Think about why you think the student is making the error. This is crucial to figure out how to drive the instruction.

In the primary grades, students sometimes learn a strategy I call “Guess and GO”. These students are looking at the beginning of the word, and guessing on the rest. They do not read through the middle of the word.

  

Sometimes students will have errors similar to guessing, like this:

was/saw

here/her

us/use

Whenever students have these errors, I show them both words. I ask the students if they can see how the words are different and how they are the same. We discuss the meaning of each word  and then use strategies from our intervention binders to help fix it.

In our binders, we've included running record analysis to help you decide which sections you will need. This has been so helpful to so many of our colleagues!

We have intervention binders for Kindergarten through Fourth Grade!