Week 6

1. Instructional focus based on the assessment results

I feel the instructional focus of the intervention should on reading comprehension and understanding the story structure. While Mary’s strengths were on display during her reading an unfamiliar expository text at 95% accuracy, her retelling of the passage showed her poor recall of the main idea, where she remembered only 16 out of the 49 of the main ideas and details listed and her scores when retelling of the number of ideas was at 33%, and her level of comprehension was 63%.

2. Length of Intervention (How many weeks? Daily lessons? How long is the lesson while maintaining the rest of your class?)

Being Mary is an ESL student, aside from any services she will be receiving, she should receive intervention at least twice a week between a 1/2 hour  to 50 minutes  of instruction per session. Assessments should be conducted often enough to track progress. I feel this is something Mary could benefit throughout the school year but if it coincides with her ESL services and the assessments depict that she is making progress, the sessions can go from twice a week to weekly and be adjusted accordingly.

3. Intervention structure (intervention components, such as repeated reading, decoding, encoding, expository structure and details, writing…)

I feel Mary’s intervention sessions should include instruction on using the structure strategy, which will help her follow the logical structure of text to understand how an author organized and emphasized ideas, and it will help her overall reading and writing organization as well. The interventions should include repeated readings so she can work on recalling details. The more she reads a passage and “looks back”, the more Mary will be able to test herself to see what she recalled from the reading beforehand.  Materials that consist of well-structured texts with elements such as cause and effect, compare and contrast, sequencing, or problem-solution, should be included so Mary will have clear-cut opportunities to work on her understanding of story structure and increase her familiarity with different structures in order to help with her over-all mental representation.  (Mayer & Ray, 2011) The information can be organized in forms of graphic tools such as Venn Diagrams, story maps, or sequence charts to gain a further understanding of the text structure, which is a great visual aid for an ESL student as well. Literacy responses and other creative writing opportunities should be incorporated as well to provide Mary with opportunities to apply her understandings to her own thoughts and ideas.

4. Create one sample mini-lesson that addresses Mary’s areas of need. 

An example of a mini-lesson catering to Mary’s struggle with understanding text structure can be one that focuses on texts with cause and effect structure.  This lesson can be conducted within a small-group intervention structure so collaborative learning is in place. Mary can work with her peers to understand the text and the main idea. Begin the lesson with reviewing/explaining concept of cause and effect (e.g.: I wore a raincoat- its raining outside= which is which). Then have Mary and her peer(s) come up with a few themselves. Introduce a text with this text structure (such as “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” or “If You Give a Moose a Muffin” by Laura Joffe Numeroff) and, to assess prior knowledge, go through ask students what they know or may know about the book (What about? Who are characters?) . The book should be read via guided reading, as students follow along with own copy of text. Begin a discussion/review of the text and be sure to model identifying the cause and effect relationships. After rereading is complete, have the students compile a list of cause and effect relationships in the text (if more than two students in group, have them work in pairs). For Mary’s individual comprehension assessment of text have her retell the story and respond to questions posed to her that will assess comprehension. Have her complete a cause and effect chart as well to organize the information for her. It’s not only about the reading the words well, but understanding the idea of what the author is trying to convey. While there may be pictures involved in this text and not completely expository, I feel Mary is at a level where one text structure should be focused on at a time, so they become clear to her and she will learn how to analyze the text and understand it better.

Bibliography

Mayer, B. J., & Ray, M. N. (2011). Structure strategy interventions: Increasing reading comprehension of expository text. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education , 4 (1), 127-152.