Monday, February 10, 2014

mclass data explanation form

Parents,
The children have made great growth in their reading!  Hip, hip, hooray! J   I am so proud of them, and I thank you for all of your support with their reading at home.  I wanted to send with your Home Connect letters a brief explanation of the results.  Of course we can go over this in more detail at our conference!
At the beginning of the year, midyear (now), and at the end of the year your student completes 3 mclass tests: The DORF, the Daze and the TRC.  This may help to explain the “white reading/running men” on your home connect letter that tell you if your student needs most support, some support, goal, or advanced. Please also look at the information on the side next to the colored areas with the “reading men”.
The DORF (you will see 3 “reading men” for this test on your home connect letter) focuses on reading fluency.  This is a measure of how many words your student is able to read correctly a minute. The number of words per minute is taken on three different stories and the middle (median) score is recorded. There is also an accuracy portion of the DORF where your student tells me all that they can remember from each of the 3 passages. They get an accuracy score based on how many correct words they recount when retelling the story. The last “reading man” tells of the quality of their response meaning how many details did they remembered, were the details in the correct sequence, and did they tell me the main idea of the passage.  
The Daze is a 3 minute paper/pencil assessment that is given to the whole class whereas the other 2 tests are done individually with me. Students are given 3 minutes to read a passage.  After approximately every seventh word, the student is asked to pick a word from a choice of 3 words to provide the correct meaning in the sentence.  Students are scored on the number of correct words chosen.
The last, biggest, most important, and longest test is the TRC. In this test your student reads an entire story (fiction or nonfiction). I record “mistakes” made and what type of mistakes were made such as leaving a word out, adding a word, self correcting themselves, repeating a word or two, etc. I also add in what cues or why they made the mistake—it looked like the word, it didn’t change the meaning, it grammatically still made sense. I then ask them 5 questions orally about the book in which they can refer to the book to help them with their answers. Usually 3 questions that have a specific answer and 2 that are open ended.  Lastly your student your student must provide written responses to 2 questions about the book. Written responses are a big part of reading comprehension. J 
I hope this explanation is of help.  Please let me know if you have any questions.  Please continue to encourage your child to read a variety of texts each night for their twenty-five minutes of nightly reading and also alternate each night between fiction and non-fiction.  Please have your child take their time and give their best work on the nightly reading comprehension homework—as this is great practice on the skills we are working on in class. 
Thank you for all of your support!  I feel so blessed to be working with such an amazing bunch of students and families!  J 

Carol Ann Pyburn

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