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.
