Field Experience: Informal Assessment and Reflection

Field Observation Experience Your Name Subject and Section Professor’s Name Date Part 1: Formal Observation While observing a kindergarten classroom recently, I decided to concentrate my analysis on an exceptionally gifted girl named Emma, who was not her real name, while she was reading "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" by Beatrix Potter. An impressive aspect was how Emma figured out how to read such words as “disobedience” and “implore,” as well as her excellent phonemic awareness. While observing her reading fluency, she committed only two acquisition errors, which she self-corrected independently, demonstrating an ability to monitor her reading process and correct the mistakes accordingly. They were primarily accurate replacements that were semantically related depending on the context, like using mad instead of angry. In general, Emma was more fluent than other children of her age. She read with good intonation, rhythm, and appropriate pauses at commas and periods, and the variations in her voice's pitch to match the story's tone. For instance, she becomes gentle and quiet during the part where Peter is scared, and there is much energy during the part where Peter escapes from Mr. McGregor. This expressive reading showed that she was in sync with what the text was all about. Multiple questions were posed to Emma after she finished reading to ensure she comprehended what she read. She correctly narrates the events, expounds on why Peter did that, and concludes the story to arrive at lessons that could be learned. Her remarks about curiosity being the root of rebellion Peter displayed in disobedience were an excellent example of her aptitude in theme analysis. More evidence supporting Emma's positive attitude toward reading could be the playfulness with which she interacted with the book's text and the illustrations, as well as her poses during the video that looked confident and unstrained. Although Emma performs lower than the second-grade average in all of these analyzed aspects of reading, she is considerably higher than the average of all kids in kindergarten. This has shown that she is intelligent and that she should be provided with books and other reading materials to foster her talents. Part 2: Assessment Selection and Administration Reading Fluency Assessment The Reading Fluency assessment will compare Emma's real-time reading speed, accuracy, and ability to read expressively based on the number of correct words read in one minute. To perform this assessment, I will choose a passage from one text of an appropriate level that Emma has yet to read before to get a fair test of her reading skills (Reading Rockets, n.d.). This is a practical lesson because as she reads aloud, I will use a stopwatch to record her for one minute while observing her errors, the self-corrections she makes, if any, and the rate at which she reads. For instance, if Emma reads a 100-word passage and makes a mistake thrice, Emma's score is 97 words per minute. I will also listen to her when she is speaking or reading, especially on issues such as whether she raises her voice whe...