Case Study

During the first few weeks in a classroom, Miss Mack was observing each student. In the row closest to the door was a little boy with glasses. His name was Brodi. Brodi is an energetic fourth grader who always has a smile on his face. He is what everyone would call a typical boy. He loves sports, hunting, and fishing. In school, Brodi is involved with the hunting safety classes, basketball, baseball, and football. He enjoys watching anything on Nickelodeon especially “Drake and Josh”, “iCarly”, Nick@ Nite, and “Spongebob”. His favorite show is anything that has to do with wrestling and WWE. Talking to Brodi, she found out that he enjoyed reading, and he would even choose to read over watching television. Brodi seems to be a person that everyone could get along with. He has plenty of friends and works well with the rest of his peers. He also is respectful to the classroom teacher as well as other surrounding adults.

Miss Mack decided to get an article from Sports Illustrated for Kids for Brodi to read and discuss. This article should entice Brodi because it is about extending the regular football season. Once the article was read, Brodi was asked a few questions about the story. To assess Brodi’s comprehension, Miss Mack used a Rubric dedicated for retelling a nonfiction story. Using this assessment for comprehension provides support in many ways. Retelling stories helps students like Brodi to begin to understand sequence, plot, and characterization as they build vocabulary and comprehension skills. Most importantly it provides the fundamental skills to become a fluent reader. When asked what the story was about, he answered that it was about football players with issues. With assistance, he could state that they NFL wanted to change the number of games up to 18, and he also included that the NFL would play more games internationally.

In concluding to the retelling assessment of the article, Miss Mack discovered that Brodi would need some work in comprehension. Most of his answers were fragmented and not complete. Some were completely inaccurate to the events in the story. As Miss Mack asked the questions, Brodi again got cautious to answer the questions. He seemed a bit more comfortable whenever she would prompt him. With some guidance, Brodi may cease his problem and apprehension about the main ideas in the story. If Miss Mack had extra time to assist in improving Brodi’s comprehension skills, she would try many different approaches to help Brodi. To facilitate comprehension and memory of stories, students need to know about the general structure of stories. One tool, Miss Mack could use to help Brodi understand the story is the story map. This is quite useful for any reading material that he could come across. Story Maps are graphic organizers that can be useful in helping a student analyze or write a story. This type of analysis is especially good for examining fables and folktales. They help the student identify the elements of the story and the theme or moral of the story. Some of the many elements of a story include the important characters, the setting of the story, the problem faced by the characters, how the problem is approached, and the outcome Research shows that teaching students about the plan or structure of a story leads to improved comprehension. (1997). Brodi would benefit from this because he could use the story map and fill it in as he goes along.It would help him to remember key facts and main ideas of the story. Repeating this with each story will help create better understanding and confidence in comprehension.

  Unlike the story map, this strategy may be more beneficial to Brodi when he is in the whole class setting because it does not single himself out to his peers. This is also an easy strategy that could be easily adapted to any subject.

Finally, Brodi will need to practice his comprehension skills in a way that is beneficial to both him and the teacher. One method in doing it is a bit tedious but extremely effective. There are practice comprehension quizzes and worksheets that will give reinforcement to the strategies mentioned above.

The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Brodi would be asked to answer questions about the selection that is being read. Often students assume that every question’s answer is directly stated somewhere in the text, if only they look hard enough. This makes the ideas of comprehension more difficult as well. Nonetheless, teaching Brodi and giving him reinforcement using this strategy will not only give him extra practice but will also engage him in reading comprehension (2009). With the help of these strategies, Miss Mack hopes that Brodi’s comprehension ability will improve. This will make him enjoy reading a novel, or magazine even more. If she had time to do these strategies, these ideas would not be easy to do on her own. She would need to collaborate with the rest of Brodi’s teachers to aid in these strategies. Brodi will need a lot of help from these teachers so he will not give up due to his poor self-esteem and not believing he can. Like a famous proverb goes, “If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.” He will need to hear words of encouragement throughout this time.

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