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Running Records for Early Literacy
You can tell that Springfield City Schools is serious about literacy education in a number of ways. Perhaps most significant is the attention given to early literacy—not reading scores alone, but assessment of progress in mastering new words and making sense of them in context.
Running Records
Taken over time during early literacy training (K-2), Running Records give teachers a powerful tool for making decisions on appropriate grouping, materials and support strategies.
Based on structured observation of a child’s reading and writing behaviors, Running Records exemplify authentic assessment, critical with emergent readers as they encounter new reading material.
Check out the process in Fountas and Pinnell’s book Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children, Chapter 7, “Running Records” (Heinemann, 1996).
How the Process Works
As the student reads aloud from text, the teacher-observer watches closely, coding behaviors on a separate sheet of paper.
Words read accurately receive a check. Errors receive a line, with reader behavior recorded above the line and teacher actions recorded below.
A simple coding system to designate attempt, omission, substitution, appeal for help, repetition, insertion, or self-correction allows the teacher to observe each child’s specific strategies for reading the words.
What the results indicate
If the scored Running Record shows an accuracy rate at below 90%, this indicates that the material might be too hard.
Accuracy between 90-94% is considered “instructional,” and the teacher will want to select more independent-reading materials in this range.
Accuracy between 95-100% indicates that the child is ready to progress to more challenging materials without resorting to labored sounding of words.
Goal of Running Records
As students move from one grade to the next—or one school to the next—Running Records prove invaluable in communicating where the student is in literacy development.
The primary goal, however, is to help students develop what Fountas and Pinnell call a “self-extending system.”
This system indicates that children are learning “to apply the strategies of self-monitoring, searching, using multiple information sources, and self-correction on more difficult texts and for longer and longer stretches of print.” (p. 95)
Read more on Springfield’s Literacy Framework >
