Migrant Elementary Data Team 2011-12
Fill in the Blanks: Teaching Students to Self-Correct
& Monitor Their Reading
The Migrant Elementary Data Team focused on strategies that would teach the
students to monitor and self-correct their reading. The strategies used to help
students monitor their reading were the reading cues and the cloze strategy.
Example cloze sentence:
When I read, I like to _________. I always __________ every time I pick
up a book.
We noticed that many students were struggling in the area of comprehension.
During the past 5 years there has been a great emphasis in the education system
on teaching students decoding and fluency as measured by reading rate because
these are easily tracked and measureable skills. When analyzing the students’
miscues it was apparent that students were relying heavily on the visual cueing
system (the letter-sound correspondence) and were less likely to use structural or
meaning based cues to help them read unknown words. As a result, the skills that
are more complex to teach such as reading for meaning and being metacognitive
when you read were not being emphasized with the students because of the
difficulty in assessing and teaching these skills.
P. Unruhe, Migrant Education Region XI, May, 2012
The Reading Cues
Cueing System
Prompt
Visual
Does it look right?
¿Se ve bien?
Structural
Does it sound right?
¿Se escucha bien?
Meaning
Does it make sense?
¿Tiene sentido?
Icon
Teaching the students to self-correct by using the reading cues with the cloze
strategy is beneficial to the students for the following reasons:
 Helps the students to become more holistic readers who are reading to
understand the meaning of the words at the sentence level which builds
the skills that they will need to comprehend the text at the passage level
 Guides students to stop and clarify their reading
 Teaches students to be metacognitive about their reading
 Encourages joyful learning by giving students the chance to play around
and have fun with the words and the language so that they can learn to
tune their “ear” to how the language sounds
Migrant Reading Assessment:
The Migrant Elementary Teachers are using the Fountas and Pinell Reading
Benchmark Assessment System (F&P). This assessment was chosen because it is a
diagnostic assessment, assigns an instructional reading level for each student, and
is bilingual. This assessment was adopted at the beginning of this year. The focus
of this data team and upcoming data teams will be highlighting the various
components of this assessment. These components compliment the skills that
P. Unruhe, Migrant Education Region XI, May, 2012
the National Reading Panel report recommended as essential skills for proficient
readers. During META we will be observing which strategies are most affective in
building the skills that are being measured in this assessment.
The F & P assessment is broken down into the following components:






accuracy
self-correction ratio
fluency
reading rate
comprehension measured both orally and in written responses
grade level reading equivalency
Assessment Protocol:
The Migrant Elementary Staff looked at pre and post assessment data using the
F&P Assessment focusing specifically on the area of self-correction ratios. The
self-correction is a ratio measuring the number of times a student makes a
reading error compared to the number of times the student corrects those errors.
This ratio is measured as 1:___ For example, if a student received a score of 1:4
this would be interpreted as the student is self-correcting one out of every four
errors. The lower the number the more the student is self-correcting except if the
student gets a score of 1:0 which means that the student is making only errors
and is not self-correcting at all. We used the following rubric to break down the
self-correction ratio scores.
P. Unruhe, Migrant Education Region XI, May, 2012
Rubric for Self-Correction Ratios
0:0 no errors, no self-corrections*
Above = Ab
1:1 – 1:2 self-corrections
At = At
1:3 – 1:4 self-corrections
Approaching = Ap
1:5 or higher
Below = Bl
1:0 no self-corrections
Far Below = Fb
*if a student received a self-correction ratio of 0:0 or no errors and no self-corrections and also
scored at satisfactory or above on comprehension this would indicate that the book level was
too easy for the student and the student should be continue to be assessed using a more
advanced instructional level.
Pre-Assessment Analysis:
From the pre-assessment analysis we observed that 22% of the migrant students
were measuring as proficient or higher.
Next we implemented instructional strategies to observe if they would improve
students’ self-correction ratios. Our strategy agreements were the following:
1. Specifically Teach the Cueing System for Reading
· Visual: Does it look right? Look at the beginning letter. Look at the
ending letters
· Meaning: Does it make sense? Look at the picture. Does it go with the
story?
· Structure: Does it sound right? Is it grammatically correct?
2. Incorporate the Cloze Strategy into Weekly Lesson Plans
· Teach this strategy at least once a week
· Create a cloze worksheet by removing 5-6 words from a page of
leveled text for example a guided reader
· Use culturally relevant materials to allow students to better access
their meaning and structure cues
· Use the cloze strategies with “big books” by covering up the words in
the text with post-it notes
· Share cloze worksheets with each other through e-mail
P. Unruhe, Migrant Education Region XI, May, 2012
Post-Assessment Analysis:
Self-Correction Data Migrant vs. Control Groups
35
30
25
20
Pre-Assessment
15
Post-Assessment
10
5
0
Migrant
EOE
Control
The migrant students showed an increase in proficiency on using the cloze
strategy from 22% to 33%. By contrast, the control group decreased in
proficiency. We can infer that the migrant group increased in proficiency due to
receiving the instruction but it is interesting that the control group went down so
much in their self-corrections. Perhaps this occurred because each new
assessment increases in difficulty by a reading level.
P. Unruhe, Migrant Education Region XI, May, 2012
Migrant Self-Correct Data Spanish vs. English Passages
40%
35%
30%
25%
Pre-Assessment
20%
Post-Assessment
15%
10%
5%
0%
Spanish
English
The students working in primary language had a larger group of students in the
proficient group compared with those students working in English. For the preassessment the students reading in English had zero students self-correcting at
the proficient level.
Instructional Implications:
 Explicitly teaching the reading cues system benefited the students
 Students responded positively from receiving praise and verbal feedback
from the teacher when they used the cueing system to make a selfcorrection
 Students enjoyed the creativity of the cloze activities and would laugh and
have fun when their answers sounded silly or funny
 Students working in L2 had a greater difficulty accessing the structural and
meaning parts of the cueing system and needed lots of modeling and
explicit teaching from the teacher and their peers
 Students benefited from working with partners on the cloze activity so that
they could collectively discuss and negotiate for meaning structural and
meaning cues
P. Unruhe, Migrant Education Region XI, May, 2012
 Using familiar reads or text with patterns and rhymes helped to guide the
students in choosing the vocabulary for the cloze activities
 Using text that was cultural relevant helped give the students a context that
gave them a foundation for using the structure and meaning cues
Areas for further inquiry:
Migrant Self-Correction Data Pre-Assessment vs. Post-Assessment
60%
50%
40%
Pre-Assessment
30%
Post-Assessment
20%
10%
0%
Proficient
Below
Far Below
In looking at this chart it shows that there was a lot of movement from the below
proficient group to the proficient group. On the other hand, fifty percent of the
students started and remained in the Far Below Basic group meaning that they
were making zero self-corrections during their reading.
One thing that we know is that as readers become more skilled they begin to
make self-corrections internally in their mind, rather than externally out loud.
What this means is that the student could be self-correcting but this process
P. Unruhe, Migrant Education Region XI, May, 2012
would be occurring inside their head and we would not be able to measure their
rate of self-corrections.
For future study, it would be important to monitor this group that is making zero
self-corrections to find out why they are not self-correcting. One way to check
why a student was making zero self-corrections would be to look at their reading
comprehension. Students that were self-correcting but doing so internally
would most likely show higher comprehension because they would be monitoring
their reading. If a student was not self-correcting because they were not
monitoring their reading then this student would most likely also score poorly on
the comprehension section. Students who were making no self-corrections and
are also scoring as below proficient in their comprehension would need to receive
further instruction in using the reading cues.
Thank you to all of the Migrant Teachers who contributed to this study:
James Brudnick, Gwen Berliner, Jose Camacho, Diana Muñoz, Alex Gatica,
Michelle Siprut, Barbara Gomez, Veronica Melgoza, Casimira Salazar, Esteban
Ortiz, Lilia Diaz
A special thanks to our Migrant Director, Faris Sabbah, for his continued guidance
and support.
P. Unruhe, Migrant Education Region XI, May, 2012