EDUC 560 Sean Case Study - A Teacher's Portfolio by Layne ... · Microsoft Word - EDUC 560 Sean...
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Layne C. Smith Education 560 Case Study: Sean a Student At Windermere Elementary School
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Introduction The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary analysis of the results of the “reading buddy” activity
had on Sean a student in the Upper Arlington School District, Upper Arlington, Ohio. Judy Schnoor,
Upper Arlington School District, and Dr. Cindy Bowman of Ashland University, Columbus Center,
coordinated the “reading buddy” exercise. The correspondence began on September 2 and ended on
September 27. Sean wrote eight letters including one bio-poem in response to the nine letters I had
written to him. The topic of the writings was from Jerry Spinelli’s book Wringer. The intent of the study
was to encourage my “reading buddy,” Sean, to write about what he had read from questions I had posed
in my correspondence to him. These questions were to help Sean think about and write about a personal
connection he may have either to the characters or to the setting as we read the book together. Ideally,
Sean would have latched on to something that piqued his interest in the story and expand on it through
his writing.
This paper includes three sections that contain copies of marked-up notes I had made as I was preparing
for this study. The first section “Response Notes” contains highlighted copies of questions I had posed to
Sean and copies of letters from Sean responding to my previous letter to him during our month long
correspondence. Tabular and graph data are included to show how I parsed the letters into data, that
hopefully, provides some meaningful results. The second section “Notes” contains all copies of letters
from Sean in which I did my first round of making notes and word counts from his letters and his bio-
poem. A graph summarizing the word counts are included. The third section “Correspondences” contains
all the original letters from Sean and non marked-up copies of my letters to Sean.
My Impression of Sean Sean attends Mrs. Schnoor’s 5th grade class at Windermere Elementary School in the Upper Arlington
School District. He has two brothers and one sister, Matt, Jacob and Paige. Jacob, Paige and Sean are
triplets. Sean is the youngest child in the family. He enjoys playing lacrosse, doing stunt riding on his
bicycle, and playing video games. One of his favorite movies is Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith and
one of his favorite books is Millions and is currently reading Hatchet. From his letters, I have the
impression Sean does get excited about reading new books. Sean has interests to the outside world. He
would like to visit Australia and see the “biggest waterfall in the world.” Sean is a fun loving boy who
enjoys being with his family and friends. Moreover, he believes that friends need to be kind to each other.
For example, Sean was not too keen of how one character, Beans was treating Dorothy and expressed
his satisfaction that eventually Palmer and Dorothy became friends. However, he does fear violence. In
his bio-poem, he mentions that he fears that someone will point a gun at him and his brother. In Wringer,
he is sympathetic to the main character’s dislike of wanting to wring (kill) birds.
Layne C. Smith Education 560 Case Study: Sean a Student At Windermere Elementary School
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Number of Words Written In Selected Paragraphs From Letters Written by Sean From September 2-27, 2005
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Total 27 42 43 50 36 46 53 48
Avg 9.00 14.00 14.30 16.67 12.00 15.33 17.66 16.00
2-Sep 13-Sep 14-Sep 15-Sep 16-Sep 19-Sep 20-Sep 27-Sep
Description of Responses Ascertaining Sean’s “T-Unit”
In general, the T-unit length is a measure of syntactic complexity and cognitive maturity in a writer.
Therefore, less-experienced writers tend to conjoin shorter sentences. In my analysis, I concocted my
version of the “T-Unit” by simply counting the number of words in a three-sentence paragraph, and then
calculated the average by counting the number of all words in a paragraph and then dividing by three.
Therefore, I determined the average number of words per sentence for each letter I received from Sean
during the study period. As can be seen in the chart below, the average number of words written by Sean
in each letter increased. From September 2-13, the average improved by five words. However, the letter
of September 16 was
4.67 words less than the
previous day at 16.67
words. A few days later,
the average number of
words written jumped
back up again to 15.33
words for September 19
and 17.66 (the highest
average) for September
20. The decline on
September 16 may be
due to writing fatigue (he
wrote four letters in four days) because three days later the average rises once again. As seen in the
graph, the red trend line is upward sloping then flattens out. I believe the data shows that Sean was an
active and enthusiastic reader of Wringer and he enjoyed writing about it.
Directed Responses Description of Elements The table below summarizes the six elements used to evaluate “Directed Responses” section of the case
study. In the column, “Questions Asked” lists the number of direct and indirect questions posed in my
letters to Sean during the study period. As indicated, I had asked 41 questions, averaging almost six
questions per letter. In the “Questions Answered” column lists the number of answers, directly and
indirectly, responded to by Sean. As shown in the table, Sean answered 12 questions, averaging almost
two per letter. The “Key Points” column is the number of summation statements Sean had written in his
Layne C. Smith Education 560 Case Study: Sean a Student At Windermere Elementary School
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letters to me about Wringer. Sean wrote eight key points for an average of little more than one key point
per letter. The number of “Misspelled Words” column tabulation was not critical of his spelling ability
but to gauge his
attention to detail
in his writing.
Sean had
misspelled 15
words for an
average of two
words per letter.
The “Personal
Connections”
category is a
tabulation of the
number of instances that Sean related an element of the story to his own personal experiences. In his
letters, I highlighted four instances of Sean making a personal connection to Palmer, the main character
in the story. A “Descriptive Sentences” category identified the sentences that expressed Sean’s interest in
a particular passage of the story. The detail he writes about in passages from the book and by his careful
spelling of difficult words denotes a descriptive sentence.
Elements 1 & 2: Questions Asked and Questions Answered Analysis As seen from the table above Sean answered 29% of the questions posed to him during the study period.
Not knowing the metrics of how other students responded to questions posed to them through our
correspondences to Mrs. Schnoors’s fifth grade class, I cannot compare this percentage to other “reading
buddy” students. However, I will attempt to make some reasonable conclusions about Sean from the
findings.
The highest number of written responses to questions posed to Sean was at the beginning and at the end
of the “reading buddy” activity. Sean wrote no responses to questions from September 14-16. It is my
impression that Sean became more concerned about writing summaries of the readings then thoughtful
reflection on what had transpired in a particular chapter of the book. This fatigue in responding to
questions ended September 16 ostensibly because there was more time to write. Many of the written
responses from Sean did latch onto a certain aspect of the story. For example, the friendship between
Palmer and Dorothy piqued Sean’s interest. In his first letter about Wringer September 13 letter, Sean
demonstrated his enthusiasm for reading and writing as exemplified by the picture he drew depicting
Palmer and the pigeon.
Date
# Questions Asked
# Questions Answered
# of Key Points
# of Misspelled Words
# of Personal Connections
# of Descriptive Sentences
13-Sep 4 4 0 2 3 0
14-Sep 4 0 0 2 1 2
15-Sep 7 0 0 1 0 1
16-Sep 3 0 0 2 0 2
19-Sep 10 2 1 5 0 1
20-Sep 8 1 3 1 0 0
27-Sep 5 5 4 2 0 0
Total 41 12 8 15 4 6
Avg/Letter 5.86 1.71 1.14 2.14 0.57 0.86
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Element 3: Key Point Analysis The letters from September 19-20 and 27 demonstrated Sean’s ability to identify and summarize the
important parts of the story. He correctly used proper quotation marks in his letter to identify a key
passage from chapters 17-22. In his September 20 letter, Sean identified three points that were crucial to
the outcome of the story. In the September 27 letter, his author’s study, Sean identified four key points
about the story. I paraphrased what Sean wrote: (1) friendships change over time, (2) making choices
about the friends you do have, (3) deciding on what is the right thing to do may not be popular with friends
and family, (4) doing the right thing is important.
Element 4: Misspelled Words Analysis As can be seen from the above table, Sean averaged two misspellings per letter, may be viewed as a
measure of how careful a writer Sean is, or can be. The anomaly of the September 19 letter contained
five misspelled words, many of which the letters were transposed when he wrote them. However, Sean
does exhibit knowledge of and usually applies correct punctuation to the sentences he writes.
Element 5: Personal Connections Analysis
A disappointing aspect of Sean’s writing about Wringer was the lack of making personal responses (text-
to-text, text to self, text to society) to the story. He made four personal connections to the entire book.
(Note: the number of times I had asked Sean “open-ended questions” to make personal connections is
highlighted and documented in this study). However, Sean’s modified “T-Unit” score had a positive trend,
averaging an increase of two words per sentence with each letter he wrote. This happened because Sean
spent his time writing summative letters, corroborated by the number of “key points” in his letters (eight)
versus four for “personal connections.” The four personal connections made were early on in the
“reading buddy” program, exemplifying his enthusiasm for reading new books and for the “reading buddy”
assignment.
Sean makes three distinct personal connections to the story in his September 13 letter. He does this by,
as mentioned earlier, (1) making a interpretive drawing of Palmer and the pigeon as a header to his letter;
(2) writing about, albeit briefly, his 9th birthday party and how it differed from Palmer’s birthday party; (3)
reacting to what a wringer is and says “that would be a bad job for me because I like birds”. At the end of
the letter, he asks “Would you like to have that job?”
Element 6: Descriptive Sentence Analysis
Letters written from September 14-19 contained six sentences conveying an imaginative quality. For
example, the September 14 letter contained two descriptive sentences, covering chapters 5-8 of Wringer.
In describing the “treatment,” Sean wrote, “riding down the slide stacked and head first.” In trying to
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understand what Palmer is thinking, Sean wrote, “He went back in his mind and remembered what his
mom said about slides.”
Evaluation of Growth Sean’s formation of sentences and word usage, on average, increased with each correspondence, for the
first few days then flattened out when the letter writing stopped. When given the time to think about the
story, Sean writes descriptive sentences and provides personal responses to what he has read. I believe
Sean enjoys reading new books. From the data, Sean exhibits this enthusiasm, in the first few days, by
providing personal insights of what he has read and by the number of words, he writes in his sentences.
However, Sean does exhibit fatigue in his letter writing, when he writes everyday. His capacity to write
about a personal connection to the story waned significantly after the second letter. Although the average
number of words written in his sentences (14.38) only dropped once from his September 16 letter, the
other category, “Key Points” increased significantly, illustrating the tendency to write factual summaries
about the chapters read.
This was troubling to me for two reasons. First, it showed that Sean concentrated his writing on
summarizing chapters rather than giving his personal insight about the story. The several questions I had
posed to him, asking him to think about what he had read, and then to write a reflective sentence on what
he had read was overlooked. Second, it became clear to me that one of the major tenets of the study,
analyzing the writing and scoping the quality of the responses, was not tenable.
I would encourage Sean to do independent reading on topics that he is passionate about (i.e. lacrosse,
extreme biking, waterfalls, being one of three triplets in his family, Australia, etc) and have him express
his personal connection to what he reads by having him discuss it in small groups and then for him to
write about it. I believe Sean understands what it means to make a personal connection to what he has
read, but he needs a model on how to write about making this connection so that his writing expresses
more detail about what he is thinking. It is my pleasure in being Sean’s “reading buddy” for a month. It is
my impression that Sean is a hard-working student who possesses the ability to do above average work.