Layne C. Smith Education 560 Case Study: Sean a Student At Windermere Elementary School

Transcription

1 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary analysis of the results of the reading buddy activity had on Sean a student in the Upper Arlington School District, Upper Arlington, Ohio. Judy Schnoor, Upper Arlington School District, and Dr. Cindy Bowman of Ashland University, Columbus Center, coordinated the reading buddy exercise. The correspondence began on September 2 and ended on September 27. Sean wrote eight letters including one bio-poem in response to the nine letters I had written to him. The topic of the writings was from Jerry Spinelli s book Wringer. The intent of the study was to encourage my reading buddy, Sean, to write about what he had read from questions I had posed in my correspondence to him. These questions were to help Sean think about and write about a personal connection he may have either to the characters or to the setting as we read the book together. Ideally, Sean would have latched on to something that piqued his interest in the story and expand on it through his writing. This paper includes three sections that contain copies of marked-up notes I had made as I was preparing for this study. The first section Response Notes contains highlighted copies of questions I had posed to Sean and copies of letters from Sean responding to my previous letter to him during our month long correspondence. Tabular and graph data are included to show how I parsed the letters into data, that hopefully, provides some meaningful results. The second section Notes contains all copies of letters from Sean in which I did my first round of making notes and word counts from his letters and his biopoem. A graph summarizing the word counts are included. The third section Correspondences contains all the original letters from Sean and non marked-up copies of my letters to Sean. My Impression of Sean Sean attends Mrs. Schnoor s 5 th grade class at Windermere Elementary School in the Upper Arlington School District. He has two brothers and one sister, Matt, Jacob and Paige. Jacob, Paige and Sean are triplets. Sean is the youngest child in the family. He enjoys playing lacrosse, doing stunt riding on his bicycle, and playing video games. One of his favorite movies is Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith and one of his favorite books is Millions and is currently reading Hatchet. From his letters, I have the impression Sean does get excited about reading new books. Sean has interests to the outside world. He would like to visit Australia and see the biggest waterfall in the world. Sean is a fun loving boy who enjoys being with his family and friends. Moreover, he believes that friends need to be kind to each other. For example, Sean was not too keen of how one character, Beans was treating Dorothy and expressed his satisfaction that eventually Palmer and Dorothy became friends. However, he does fear violence. In his bio-poem, he mentions that he fears that someone will point a gun at him and his brother. In Wringer, he is sympathetic to the main character s dislike of wanting to wring (kill) birds. 1

2 Description of Responses Ascertaining Sean s T-Unit In general, the T-unit length is a measure of syntactic complexity and cognitive maturity in a writer. Therefore, less-experienced writers tend to conjoin shorter sentences. In my analysis, I concocted my version of the T-Unit by simply counting the number of words in a three-sentence paragraph, and then calculated the average by counting the number of all words in a paragraph and then dividing by three. Therefore, I determined the average number of words per sentence for each letter I received from Sean during the study period. As can be seen in the chart below, the average number of words written by Sean in each letter increased. From September 2-13, the average improved by five words. However, the letter Number of Words Written In Selected Paragraphs From Letters Written by Sean From September 2-27, 2005 of September 16 was 4.67 words less than the 60 previous day at words. A few days later, 40 the average number of 30 words written jumped 20 back up again to words for September 19 0 and (the highest 2-Sep 13-Sep 14-Sep 15-Sep 16-Sep 19-Sep 20-Sep 27-Sep average) for September Total The decline on Avg September 16 may be due to writing fatigue (he wrote four letters in four days) because three days later the average rises once again. As seen in the graph, the red trend line is upward sloping then flattens out. I believe the data shows that Sean was an active and enthusiastic reader of Wringer and he enjoyed writing about it. Directed Responses Description of Elements The table below summarizes the six elements used to evaluate Directed Responses section of the case study. In the column, Questions Asked lists the number of direct and indirect questions posed in my letters to Sean during the study period. As indicated, I had asked 41 questions, averaging almost six questions per letter. In the Questions Answered column lists the number of answers, directly and indirectly, responded to by Sean. As shown in the table, Sean answered 12 questions, averaging almost two per letter. The Key Points column is the number of summation statements Sean had written in his 2

3 letters to me about Wringer. Sean wrote eight key points for an average of little more than one key point per letter. The number of Misspelled Words column tabulation was not critical of his spelling ability but to gauge his attention to detail # # # of # of Questions Questions # of Key Misspelled # of Personal Descriptive in his writing. Date Asked Answered Points Words Connections Sentences Sean had 13-Sep Sep misspelled 15 words for an average of two words per letter. The Personal Connections category is a tabulation of the 15-Sep 16-Sep 19-Sep 20-Sep 27-Sep Total Avg/Letter number of instances that Sean related an element of the story to his own personal experiences. In his letters, I highlighted four instances of Sean making a personal connection to Palmer, the main character in the story. A Descriptive Sentences category identified the sentences that expressed Sean s interest in a particular passage of the story. The detail he writes about in passages from the book and by his careful spelling of difficult words denotes a descriptive sentence. Elements 1 & 2: Questions Asked and Questions Answered Analysis As seen from the table above Sean answered 29% of the questions posed to him during the study period. Not knowing the metrics of how other students responded to questions posed to them through our correspondences to Mrs. Schnoors s fifth grade class, I cannot compare this percentage to other reading buddy students. However, I will attempt to make some reasonable conclusions about Sean from the findings. The highest number of written responses to questions posed to Sean was at the beginning and at the end of the reading buddy activity. Sean wrote no responses to questions from September It is my impression that Sean became more concerned about writing summaries of the readings then thoughtful reflection on what had transpired in a particular chapter of the book. This fatigue in responding to questions ended September 16 ostensibly because there was more time to write. Many of the written responses from Sean did latch onto a certain aspect of the story. For example, the friendship between Palmer and Dorothy piqued Sean s interest. In his first letter about Wringer September 13 letter, Sean demonstrated his enthusiasm for reading and writing as exemplified by the picture he drew depicting Palmer and the pigeon. 3

4 Element 3: Key Point Analysis The letters from September and 27 demonstrated Sean s ability to identify and summarize the important parts of the story. He correctly used proper quotation marks in his letter to identify a key passage from chapters In his September 20 letter, Sean identified three points that were crucial to the outcome of the story. In the September 27 letter, his author s study, Sean identified four key points about the story. I paraphrased what Sean wrote: (1) friendships change over time, (2) making choices about the friends you do have, (3) deciding on what is the right thing to do may not be popular with friends and family, (4) doing the right thing is important. Element 4: Misspelled Words Analysis As can be seen from the above table, Sean averaged two misspellings per letter, may be viewed as a measure of how careful a writer Sean is, or can be. The anomaly of the September 19 letter contained five misspelled words, many of which the letters were transposed when he wrote them. However, Sean does exhibit knowledge of and usually applies correct punctuation to the sentences he writes. Element 5: Personal Connections Analysis A disappointing aspect of Sean s writing about Wringer was the lack of making personal responses (textto-text, text to self, text to society) to the story. He made four personal connections to the entire book. (Note: the number of times I had asked Sean open-ended questions to make personal connections is highlighted and documented in this study). However, Sean s modified T-Unit score had a positive trend, averaging an increase of two words per sentence with each letter he wrote. This happened because Sean spent his time writing summative letters, corroborated by the number of key points in his letters (eight) versus four for personal connections. The four personal connections made were early on in the reading buddy program, exemplifying his enthusiasm for reading new books and for the reading buddy assignment. Sean makes three distinct personal connections to the story in his September 13 letter. He does this by, as mentioned earlier, (1) making a interpretive drawing of Palmer and the pigeon as a header to his letter; (2) writing about, albeit briefly, his 9 th birthday party and how it differed from Palmer s birthday party; (3) reacting to what a wringer is and says that would be a bad job for me because I like birds. At the end of the letter, he asks Would you like to have that job? Element 6: Descriptive Sentence Analysis Letters written from September contained six sentences conveying an imaginative quality. For example, the September 14 letter contained two descriptive sentences, covering chapters 5-8 of Wringer. In describing the treatment, Sean wrote, riding down the slide stacked and head first. In trying to 4

5 understand what Palmer is thinking, Sean wrote, He went back in his mind and remembered what his mom said about slides. Evaluation of Growth Sean s formation of sentences and word usage, on average, increased with each correspondence, for the first few days then flattened out when the letter writing stopped. When given the time to think about the story, Sean writes descriptive sentences and provides personal responses to what he has read. I believe Sean enjoys reading new books. From the data, Sean exhibits this enthusiasm, in the first few days, by providing personal insights of what he has read and by the number of words, he writes in his sentences. However, Sean does exhibit fatigue in his letter writing, when he writes everyday. His capacity to write about a personal connection to the story waned significantly after the second letter. Although the average number of words written in his sentences (14.38) only dropped once from his September 16 letter, the other category, Key Points increased significantly, illustrating the tendency to write factual summaries about the chapters read. This was troubling to me for two reasons. First, it showed that Sean concentrated his writing on summarizing chapters rather than giving his personal insight about the story. The several questions I had posed to him, asking him to think about what he had read, and then to write a reflective sentence on what he had read was overlooked. Second, it became clear to me that one of the major tenets of the study, analyzing the writing and scoping the quality of the responses, was not tenable. I would encourage Sean to do independent reading on topics that he is passionate about (i.e. lacrosse, extreme biking, waterfalls, being one of three triplets in his family, Australia, etc) and have him express his personal connection to what he reads by having him discuss it in small groups and then for him to write about it. I believe Sean understands what it means to make a personal connection to what he has read, but he needs a model on how to write about making this connection so that his writing expresses more detail about what he is thinking. It is my pleasure in being Sean s reading buddy for a month. It is my impression that Sean is a hard-working student who possesses the ability to do above average work. 5

6 6

7 7

8 8

9 9

10 10

11 11

12 12

13 13

14 14

15 15

16 Layne C. Smith Education

17 17

18 18

19 19

20 20

21 21

22 22

23 23

24 24

25 25

26 26

27 27

28 28

29 29

30 30

31 31

32 32

33 33

34 34