Assessing+Reading



By recording the reading of children using running records, book at the appropriate level can be given to a child. A running record involves selecting a book from the child’s reading level, asking them to read it and then marking the child’s incorrect responses and calculating a score.

The following is a brief summary of how to take a running record and what implications the different scores have. For detailed instructions you can visit http://www.readinga-z.com/newfiles/levels/runrecord/runrec.html  ·  Count how many running words are in the text. (do not count titles and subtitles)  ·  Errors are counted for, miscues, omissions, insertions, words proved by the teacher, no responses and words skipped.  ·  A skipped page is considered one error and the teacher needs to subtract the word count for that page from the total amount of words in the text.  ·  Proper nouns read incorrectly are counted only once, however, all other words read incorrectly are counted every time.  ·  Errors are not counted if the child, self-corrects words, words that are repeated by the child and words that the child pronounced differently due to their language.  ·  To work out the percentage of accuracy, the teacher must subtract the number of errors form the amount of total words in the text and then divide that by the number of running words. Eg, 10 errors were made and there were 50 running words: 50-10 / 50 = 40/50 = 80% therefore the text was too difficult for the child.  ·  95-100% = Easy 90-94% = Instructional 90% and below = Difficult (Hill 2006, p.160)