2. Teach the Strategy with Fidelity

This was an individual tutoring situation where we met for typically 1-2 times a week for an hour each time. Roman is currently in the 7th grade and has been receiving tutoring with me since the end of 3rd grade. Initially, he had very weak decoding skills and that was our primary focus of instruction. But by 6th grade, he had caught back up to grade level with word recognition, although his fluency rate is not at the 50%ile for his age, and may never be.  Our focus turned to comprehension and generalizing the skills he has learned into his general education classroom.  While his grades are very strong, he still has not been able to obtain a passing score on his End of Grade testing. He was only a few points away from passing at the end of 6th grade. We hoped that by learning the inference strategy, he would be able to pass that elusive goal. Now that word recognition is not the issue, he needs to develop deeper level comprehension skills. He tends to focus on the literal level of the text and Informal Reading Inventories indicate with difficulty with inference questions. This may explain why he cannot break the level 3 barrier on his End of Grade Tests. Roman and I started learning the Inference Strategy in September 2017 with 1-2 sessions a week for one hour. But both our schedules made consistent tutoring a challenge. By December, Roman had decided that he had had enough of tutoring since he had been doing it for almost 4 years and was making terrific grades in all his classes. We had a serious discussion about finishing this one particular strategy and talked about how it could be the difference for passing his EOG tests. He agreed to finish and we started letting him take independent passages home to practice in hopes of speeding up the process. But again, both our busy schedules and life events did not allow us to complete all the steps until April 2018.

I began teaching the strategy in December of 2017. I teach resource 9th grade literature and felt that students were not equipped with relevant tools to comprehend grade-level text. I used their Lexiles from state testing as a starting point. Then I gave students leveled word lists/running records to get a better indication of their independent and instructional reading levels. The baseline was in December was a 9th grade fiction and non-fiction text. The following cold reads are from the Inference Strategy materials.

This strategy was taught to a group of 5th grade Special Education students in a Resource setting. Students in this group were presented with this strategy daily and it was taught with fidelity and according to the manual. Students were given opportunities throughout the strategy to Generalize,  which encouraged their ability to utilize the strategy.

I have taught the Inference Strategy to high school student between 2010-2013 as well as taught it elementary age students.  My students have found great success and was easily implemented as well as generalized by students. When implemented with high school and elementary school students they either passed the state assessment or their score was significantly impacted (in a positive way).    

There are two middle schools in Muscatine, Central and West.  All teachers working with Level 1 and Level 2 students attended the professional development session.  The teachers seemed engaged during the session.  We put student folders together as a large group and worked through many passages together.  All teachers seemed to enjoy the training.  Our MAP assessments had showed that inferencing skills were our lowest at the elementary and middle school levels for the previous two years.