Portfolio Assessment Case Study

Portfolio Assessment Case Study Student Name Institution Professor Course Date Portfolio Assessment Case Study Description of the Child/Student AG is a 13-year-old male student currently in the 7th grade. AG has attended the local school since his early years and kept his attendance records since then. He resides with his parents, who are Spanish-English fluent speakers, and his young sibling in a suburban place. Family members of AG, especially his parents and relatives, give importance to education and always encourage him to study. Currently, he is working in a general education class wherein he receives a pull-out service now and then for his literacy needs. AG is a good learner with a passion for sciences and technology. However, he struggles with reading comprehension, affecting his performance in different subjects. Moreover, he struggles in written expression but is quite strong in Mathematics and problem-solving if presented as project work. Methods Academic/Developmental Domains This assessment centered on reading comprehension because AG has been observed to have comprehension difficulties when reading grade-level texts. Teachers have indicated that AG has difficulty comprehending meaning, making connections, and summarizing during group activities. These have led the school to assess his ability to understand lessons and devise a specific instructional plan. Reading comprehension was chosen as the target domain among various domains because of its importance in AG’s academic achievement. Assessments Used The Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Achievement (WJ IV) were employed to determine AG’s reading comprehension levels. This comprehensive tool was selected to identify specific deficits in a child’s academic skills and determine isolated weaknesses. According to Riverside Insights (2022), the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Achievement evaluates “foundational reading, writing, and mathematical skills” (p. 9). For these reasons, the WJ IV was chosen due to its flexibility and diagnostic utility in acquiring AG’s comprehensive profile to recognize his areas of strength and weakness in reading comprehension. Therefore, from all the subtests and clusters in the complete battery, Passage Comprehension, Basic Reading Skills, and Reading Fluency facilitated the determination of AG’s reading ability profiles. Results and Discussion Findings Passage Comprehension Subtest On the Passage Comprehension subtest, AG got 84, equivalent to the 14th percentile of the average score of his grading level. This score indicates that his ability to understand the material and extract information from the text is much lower than that of other similar-aged learners. Thus, AG had difficulties in tasks that demanded multiple levels of meaning, relationships between concepts, and information integration. The specific results of the current study imply that, despite being able to decode words successfully, AG needs help with intermediate comprehension and synthesizing of information obtained from reading. Reading Fluency Subtest AG’s performance in the Reading Fluency subtest was 94, with a percentile ranking of 34. It means that AG reads at a moderate pace and probably possesses transfer commands for word recognition; nonetheless, he does not necessarily acquire the text critically. On the one hand, fluency positively contributes to his minimal essential reading ability; on the other hand, his slow reading rate, resulting from fluency interacting with comprehension tasks, might be a weak point affecting his academic performance. Basic Reading Skills Cluster AG achieved the mean Basic Reading Skills cluster score of 100, which placed him at the 50th percentile. This score indicates that AG has average f...