Diagnostic Assessment reflection

CIR 412

October 6, 2019

Diagnostic Assessment Reflection

My student, John-Lucas, was chosen for me by my ELA teacher, Ms. Brown. She decided to choose him because he needs the extra help with reading. I was excited to get the opportunity to help him and I could tell that he was excited too. I developed a working relationship with my student by starting off asking him questions like how old he was, when his birthday was, etc. I then started asking him more questions about his attitude towards reading. I found it easy to make a connection with him once he started telling me about how he loves dinosaur books especially because I had some dinosaur books at home that I knew he would love to read. I was surprised that he liked reading so much, but he was really picky about what types of books he likes to read. He is a very well-behaved child, so I knew he would read or take any assessment that I asked him to, but it was interesting to see that side of him and know what he liked and did not like, so I could use this later on.

I used the learning modules from the course to help me determine what materials I needed to use. I started by looking over the Phonics Assessment and read through the whole thing, so I would know what I needed to do when I had to give it to my student.

The assessment process took two days. I started by doing the reading inventory (Zimmerman, 2014) and assessing what John-Lucas liked about reading and how he felt about reading. This part was really great to see because I was able to view what my student thought about himself when it came to reading and how I could help him become more confident. We did have a couple setbacks. We had a fire drill and a tornado drill all in one morning, so that put us a little bit behind, but we still managed to finish everything we needed to. The results of the Phonics assessment (Moats & Tolman, 2019) surprised me as well because I discovered that my student needs help in several areas. Overall, the assessments went great and I am excited to continue working with John-Lucas and help him become a better reader.