Research School Network: Looking closely… diagnosing difficulties (Part 3)

Using Running Records to analyse children’s reading behaviour

I regularly make use of Running Records in order to get a clearer picture of a child’s reading behaviour. Class teachers may have concerns following their own assessments and observations that such children are not progressing as they would hope and may ask me to analyse their behaviour in greater detail.

A running record is a tool that helps teachers to identify patterns in children’s reading behaviours. These patterns allow a teacher to see the strategies a child uses to make meaning of individual words and texts as a whole.

Choosing a book that is age appropriate but unfamiliar to the child, I ask the child to read the story out loud to me.

Allowing the child to read as independently as possible, I take a running record, capturing the child’s behaviour by using a standard way of recording this. I am then able to work out the accuracy at which the child is reading and other important information, such as:

• Are they using the meaning of the text to monitor their comprehension?
• Are they using their knowledge of syntax or grammar as a source of information?
• Are they making use of their knowledge of the visual (letter and punctuation knowledge) information to help them to read the text?
• Have they mastered directionality, letter-sound correspondence, return sweep (i.e., sweeping back to the left on the next line of text), etc?
• Was there an attempt to monitoring their reading and self-correct errors?
• Did they attempt to decode an unknown word? How?
• Was the reading slow and laboured or fluent?
• Did they use expression and phrasing while reading?

All of the above information helps to gain a clearer understanding of the next steps for each child.

Both teachers and children gain clear information about what they are doing now and what they could do next to develop as readers.

Children, hopefully, start to appreciate their strengths and begin to monitor their own reading.