Reading Rubrics: A Special Education Progress Monitoring Tool

Being a Special Educator is similar to choreographing a three-ring circus!  The art of juggling should be a required course in Special Education educator prep programs.  

From IEP writing to teaching to presenting at IEP meetings to many, many more important tasks, Special Educators must be skilled at varying and many areas of expertise; however, one aspect can be the most difficult to manage:  PROGRESS MONITORING

The data is one of the single most paramount competencies of the field of Special Education; thus, data collection is one of the most critical skills a Special Education teacher can possess.

Without evidence, we just have beliefs, and beliefs do not hold up in court (remember IEPs are legal documents).

Data collection, on the other hand, can be annoying and cumbersome.  Who wants to interrupt teaching to assess? And don’t we assess these poor kids enough?  

As a result, then, assessment should be seamlessly integrated into teaching (and/or daily routines); but how do you do this when your “small groups” have varying IEP goals and objectives?

However, even if I have 10 students with 3 working on comprehension, 3 working on phonics, 2 working on vocabulary, and 2 working on fluency, they are at least all working on the subject area of reading.

So no problem!

There are five facets of reading:  phonemic awareness, phonics, and word study, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.  

Reading Rubrics: A Special Education Progress Monitoring Tool l Miss Rae's Room

As a result, all of the students in your reading groups will have IEP goals that fall within one of the subcategories of reading.  

The first step, then, is to identify one assessment tool that can evaluate ALL students in ALL areas of reading.

The solution to all of these issues is employing what I call Reading Rubrics!

​You can check them out HERE!

Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, and Word Study

Reading Rubrics expand on the tool of a running record.

As students are reading aloud, collect data on the section they read.  

Write down the student’s errors AND mark the section the student read.  But, first, record the text level of the passage being read aloud.

This will not interrupt the flow of the lesson or the teaching AND it can be done for each student in the reading group without pause.

Later, convert the number of words a student read correctly into a percentage for word reading accuracy.  For example, if you wrote down 10 words that were read incorrectly and 30 words were read in total, subtract the total number of words read incorrectly (errors)  from the number of running words in the text. So, 30 - 10 = 20.  Then, divide the answer (words read correctly) by the total number of running words or words read.  So, 20 divided by 30 equals 67 percent.

Word accuracy can help determine a student’s reading level:

Easy Text: 96-100% accuracy
Instructional Text: 90-95% accuracy
Hard Text: below 90% accuracy

Running records, not only provide educators with word reading accuracy, they are also a tool for identifying error patterns.  Therefore, take time to analyze the errors a student made when reading words.  For example, did a student read the words with /ed/ endings incorrectly?

Analyze a student’s reading thoughts on what sources s/he is utilizing for word reading accuracy.

Is the reader using meaning cues, structural cues, or visual cues?

Reading Rubrics: A Special Education Progress Monitoring Tool l Miss Rae's Room

Fluency
While a student is reading, use a timer to gain a fluency score for a student.  How many words does the student read accurately in one minute?

The Hasbrouck-Tindal oral reading fluency chart is a good tool for grade level fluency standards.  The chart correlates oral reading fluency rates of students in grades 1 through 8, as determined by data collected by Jan Hasbrouck and Gerald Tindal to grade level expectations.  

Vocabulary and Comprehension

When a student has finished reading a text aloud, quickly assess his/her oral reading comprehension.  

Tell me about what you read.  What was the setting? Who are the characters?  What does this word mean in the text? What is the problem?  Why was this a problem for the character? Did the characters try to solve the problem?  How?

Note the level of prompting that the teacher provided.

Record the students level of comprehension on both literal and inferential questions.

The answers will enable the teacher to subjectively assess a student’s general understanding of the text.

Here's a quick video on how I use RUNNING RECORDS with my students!
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While all of this data will not provide enough for evaluation purposes, Reading Rubrics will act as instructional tools AND data collection tools for progress reporting toward IEP goals!

~ By Miss Rae

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Online Graduate Level Professional Development Courses l Teaching Special Education Reading l The Learning Tree Professional Development Network, LLC l www.TLTPDN.com