Running Record Essay

A running record is an important tool that is one component of a three component process to identify the students appropriate instructional text level and determine if he/she is ready to progress to the next level. The first part of establishing a running record is to have the student read from grade level passages or books and to document their reading performance. The second part requires having the student retell the passage and evaluate their comprehension by using the retelling rubrics. The last part includes having the student complete an oral or written comprehension quiz which provides information for each question describing the skill it assessed in order to identify comprehension skills that require further practice (Learning A-Z,

These words are all words in a passage and do not include titles, subtitles, and captions. Self-corrections, repetitions, an accurate attempt, a successful appeal, and words that are articulated differently in the student’s native language are not calculated. Substitutions, omissions, inaccurate attempts, an unsuccessful appeal, a disclosed word, and insertions are calculated as a single error. Additionally, a skipped page and each word in a skipped line should be counted as an error. Also, proper nouns that read incorrectly only count as an error once. However, all other words that are read incorrectly are counted as errors each time. To calculate the percent of accuracy subtract the number of total errors from the number of running words. The running words is then divided by the score and multiplied by 100 totaling the accuracy percentage (Scholastic, 2002).

For the purpose of this running record exercise, a fifth grade female student was observed reading from a fifth grade level two page passage of “The Chicken Pen” by ReadWorks. The passage consisted of 843 running words, describing the narrator’s experience of being adopted by a couple who lives in Maine and adapting to the changes in her life on a