inquiry project 2 assessment 1

For my second inquiry project I decided to take my niece who will be in second grade next year, and find out what motivates her to learn how to read. I was especially interested because she is already a full grade year behind in her reading despite her claiming to enjoy reading. For my assessments I have watched and interacted with her during her first session of a summer tutoring. She was given a list of 100 of the most common words a child should know for each grade, she demonstrated she could read 93% of the words for the second grade level and 83% for the third grade level. So the question became, if she knows the words why is she behind in reading? I guessed it must simply be a lack of motivation due to the simplicity of the assigned reading. So to encourage her to read the assignments I was giving her I gave her two different kinds of extrinsic motivation, one was study with lunch and snacks as a reward. this motivated her as far as lunch. At lunch I also took her outside to the pool that is full of tadpoles. She showed a great interest in the tadpoles so I decided that when we started on the work after lunch I would use playing with the tadpoles as motivation to get her to read the second half of the day. That wasn’t exactly how it played out, I gave her some reading assignments to read to herself first and aloud second. Once she had read the material to herself (with my assistance on words she was unfamiliar with) she showed signs of fear over the depth of the material she was reading. She began to show signs of a student who’s intelligence had been praised rather than their effort. She was eager to read when she first arrived for her tutoring session, however, as the reading became more difficult she began to show signs of stress and a lack of emotional control. For example during the out loud reciprocal teaching portion, she began to display symptoms of helpless hannah, she shut down and wouldn’t read. Her head was sagging and cocked to one side while she mumbled almost as if she were pouting. Her lips didn’t move when she talked and she wouldn’t look directly at the paper she was reading. Almost as if looking directly at the words would defeat her totally. It took much attention, gentle encouragement and reminding of how her effort had gotten her this far, along with instruction on proper methods, before she would read louder and clearer. This did not however lead to her reading with more confidence. What I did find encouraging was that even after having struggled earlier that day she went to the library and enrolled in a summer reading program. Later when she arrived home she read the homework I had given her for a half an hour before dinner. Then after dinner and a brief swim break she went back to reading for close to an hour before bed. All reading was voluntary and done with out suggestion.