RUNNING RECORDS

The set in structure, the text structure and of course there's comedia or back round knowledge. These all affect your ability to identify words and comprehend text. However, if you are looking for approximate reading grade level and it's always approximate, do more than one running record, I would recommend at least three different running records to give you a better sense of what is. Now here's how you do it. You find a graded or leveled passage 100 to 350 words or so depending on the level. Of course, younger students are reading at the beginning level, you'll have fewer words. Students read the passage aloud. Now you have a text that has the exact same thing that students are reading. You put a check over the words incorrectly, identified. Now we're using the word incorrectly and not miscue here because here, this is different than miss Q analysis. We are not concerned with the type of errors or the types of miscues. That is what you do with a miscue analysis. 

There you are looking at the types of miscues here we are just looking for the words correctly or incorrectly identified. That's all we are concerned about when what the student says does not match what's on the page. From there, we calculate accuracy percentage number correct versus number of words that gives you the percentage. So you're able to determine levels at a particular grade level. For example, at re level three, the child is reading at the independent level, they're able to read 98% or more of the words to read or to identify 98% or more. And I start at the independent level and I keep going up until I hit the instructional level. Independent levels where the child is able to read it by him or herself, instructional level, they can read it with a little help or scaffolding from the teacher. That's the level we used when we instruct students on skills or comprehension. And the frustration level, we never, ever want students to be reading at this level. So it is good to know approximately each student's reading grade level. 

Now you can buy expensive running records and forms and pay a lot of money, but I would rather you use that money to buy good books. You can also save that money and develop your own running records. All you need is a graded or leveled reader, you need to know anything if you know the lexa levels or the approximate reading grade levels or found tests and pinell, it doesn't matter as long as you know the approximate re level. And again, you can use any piece of graded or leveled text, including actual books that I'm going to show you an example of this. Here's an actual book, learn about. All right? And I have the text. That's the student is going to read that. And here's a copy of the text there. Now, as the student reads, I'm going to put check marks on top of the words that were incorrectly identified. Now, I like the child reading actual books because this reflects what I have the child doing. 

I want them to be able to use pictures and context and semantics and word order, just like they do in real life to create meaning with print. That's what I want. Now, I use this as a post module assessment in an intervention I use, but here you can see the reading grade level, the word count. This is lower level approximately 1.2, so it has about a hundred words. Number of words correctly identified over the total number of words, and you get the percentage, and there you go. This is a very simplified and I think a more pragmatic approach to doing reading grade level. Running records to find approximate reading grade levels.