1. Running Records SUE pALMER 2010
The early successful reader uses his speech to interpret print.
His vocab, sentence patterns & pronunciation of words give clues for recognising printed words. He follows directional conventions (left-right)
of written language & needs to learn how to move across print.
Gradually the beginning reader becomes attentive to visual detail of words, spaces, letters & the sounds that are represented.
At the same time he starts to pull more than one kind of information into reading – visual, structural, and meaning.
Often we measure children’s progress in learning to read by testing the number of letters, sounds or words they know.
But – most of the time in class, they are asked to read continuous texts – we ask them to put together the messages transmitted by the letters, sounds and words.
For a long time we have heard that it was O.K for our younger students to learn the ‘mechanics’ of reading – without any real understanding.
It’s my belief that you’re not reading if you’re not understanding –what is the point?
If we don’t continually question to check for meaning then we are setting our students up for that infamous ‘grade 4 slump’ we experience here.
If Running Records are taken in a systemic way, they provide evidence of how well children are learning to direct their knowledge of letters, sounds and words to understanding the messages in the text.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

2. About Running records
designed to be taken as a student reads orally from any text.
provide an assessment of text reading.
provide evidence of how well students are learning to direct their knowledge of letters, sounds and words, and to understanding the messages in text.
This kind of information allows teachers to prompt, support and challenge individual students.
They can be used to check on whether students are working on material of appropriate difficulty – not too difficult, nor too easy, but a suitable level of challenge.
Capture what the reader said and did while reading.
Teachers can review what happened immediately, leading to a teaching decision on the spot, or later to plan for next lessons.
Judge what the reader already knows, what the reader attended to, and what the reader overlooked.
Assess how well reader is pulling together what he/she knows about letters, sounds and words in order to get the messages.
Plot progress – show path of progress up through gradient of difficulty in texts – should show that learners are meeting challenges of harder texts.
Can be used on both simple and more advanced texts.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

3. Taking a Running Record
Invite the child to read to you and tell them you will be writing down some things.
Student sits or stands beside the teacher.
Text must be seen clearly by the student and the teacher.
Practice until it’s easy.
Two things to avoid – printed text
- tape recording
Should be as relaxed as sharing a book with a child.
Telling the student you’re writing gives a warning that for the next few minutes you are not going to teach.
Ideally, a classroom teacher should be able to sit down with a blank sheet of paper & take a Running Record when the moment is right.
The more practice you get in, the more reliable your recording will be – observations become sharper & recording conventions automatic.
Printed text – not enough room to record all the unusual things – leaving out large sections of text, insertions, change direction, go back over what they have read, confuse themselves.
Running Rec needs to capture all the behaviour that helps interpret what the child was probably doing. Everything they say and do tells us something – comments, what hands and eyes are doing.
Aim is to ‘hear the reading again’ when reviewing the record.
Object of Running Recs is to get valid records of how children are arriving at their decisions.
Tape recording – crutch – limits the analysis because it doesn’t record visual information – how child moved, seemed puzzled, peered at the print or looked at the ceiling.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

4. Taking a Running Record (continued)
Can be any text – books, stories, information texts
Select one that the child is familiar with (has read once or twice before).
Ensure you are familiar with the text.
Introduce the book – read the title and give a 1 or 2 sentence explanation re the story. (Alternatively, ask the child to tell you what the story is about).
Start with a text that is easy for the child.
Terms easy, instructional and hard (used in Running Records) do not describe characteristics of the text – they describe how a particular child read the text.
Familiar text will provide evidence of how the reader is bringing different processes and skills together.
Prime purpose is to understand more about how children are using what they know to get the message of the text, or in other words what reading processes they are using.
For decisions re moving children to different groups, observing children with particular difficulties, selecting children for special assistance, three levels of difficulty must be obtained.
Easy (95 – 100% correct)
Instructional(90 – 94% correct) Record will contain evidence of problem-solving because it will contain some error. We then observe how children work at monitoring their own reading. In the young reader we can hear & record most of the problem solving (processing the info), but as readers become more proficient, more of the processing is hidden from view – worked out in child’s head before response is made. More later.
Hard (80 – 89% correct)
Children who are proficient readers (beyond Grade ¾?) can be assessed for a different purpose – to see how they read a new, unseen text revealing a level of achievement – to find if they recognise need for problem solving & what they try.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

5. How to Record What You See
Standard ways of recording are necessary to enable us to make comparisons –
one with another
today’s record compared with earlier records
making teaching decisions about several children
Also try to write down the comments children make as they read the book.
(see ‘Running Record Conventions’ sheet )
Need to have a common standard for describing what we observe, calculating the scores, and interpreting the record.
Record other observations – working out loud, talking to themselves, being surprised, giving some rationale for what they did – these support the interpretation of the record.
Older proficient readers become fast readers, too fast for the teacher to make ticks for every word. Then the observer can give up recording the correct responding, and keeping strictly to the layout and lines of the text, record all the processing the reader does to monitor, solve words and
self-correct.
Only do this for very fast readers. Must analyse immediately because it’s too hard to recapture the ‘reading’ from such a limited record.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

7. How to Score Errors and Self-corrections
Credit the child with any correct or corrected words.
There is no penalty for trials which are eventually correct.
Insertions add errors so that a child can have more errors than there are words in a line.
However, the child cannot receive a minus score for a page. The lowest score is 0.
Omissions: If a line or sentence is omitted each word is counted as an error. If pages are omitted (perhaps 2 pages turned together) they are not counted as errors. Note that in this case, the number of words on the omitted pages must be deducted from the Running Words Total before calculation.)
Repeated errors: If the child makes an error (e.g., ‘run’ for ‘ran’) and then substitutes this word repeatedly, it counts as an error every time; but a substitution of a proper name (e.g., ‘Mary’ for ‘Molly’) is counted only the first time.
Multiple errors and self-correction: If a child makes 2 or more errors (e.g., reads a phrase wrongly) each word is an error. If he then corrects all these errors each corrected word is a self-correction.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

8. How to score Errors and Self-corrections (cont)
8. Broken words: Where a word is pronounced as two words (e.g., a/way) even when this is backed up pointing as if it were two words, this is regarded as an error of pronunciation, not as a reading error unless what is said is matched to a different word. Such things as ‘pitcher’ for ‘picture’ and ‘gonna’ for going to’ are counted as correct.
9. Inventions defeat the system. When a young child is creatively producing his own version of the story the scoring system finally breaks down and the judgement ‘inventing’is recorded for that page, story or book.
10. ‘Try that again’. When the child is in a tangle this instruction, which does not involve teaching, can be given. It counts as one error and only the second attempt is scored.
Fewest errors. If there are alternative ways of scoring responses a general principle is to choose the method that gives the fewest possible errors.
Some other good practices:
Don’t try to analyse omissions and insertions.
Consider only the sentence up to and including the error.
Avoid analyses for which you have no theoretical support.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

9. Quantifying the Running Record
The child must read words for a useful record.
Count the words in the text, omitting titles.
Count the errors, and enter the Error Ratio
Use the conversion table to find the Accuracy Rate
4. Work out the Self-correction Ratio
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

11. Interpreting the Running Record
Look at the errors in the record
It is important to analyse every error and not to look at errors selectively.
Ask yourself, ‘What led the child to do (or say) that?’
For every error ask yourself at least 3 questions:
M - Did the meaning or the messages of the text
influence the error? Perhaps the reader brought a different meaning to the author’s text.
S - Did the structure (syntax) of the sentence up to the error influence the response?
V - Did visual information from the print influence any part of the error?
The analysis takes very little time, but it can uncover some important things about the reading process.
Readers appear to make decisions about the quality of the message they are getting. One theory would say that the child is using information of various kinds to make a choice among possible responses.
He is trying to get the best fit with the limited knowledge he has.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

13. Interpreting the Running Record (cont)
When an error is made write the letters MSV in the error column.
Circle the letters if the child’s error showed that the child could have used meaning, structure or visual information (which will include letter form and/or letter-sound relationships) from the sentence so far.
Scan the record to answer 2 other questions
Did the child’s oral language produce the error, with no influence from the print?
Was the child clearly getting some phonemic information from the printed letters?
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

15. Interpreting the Running Record (cont)
Look at self-corrections
Record in the self-correction column whether the extra information the reader added to make the self-correction was meaning, structure or visual information.
Consider the pattern of responses
Look at the overall pattern of circled responses to bring the analysis of errors and self-corrections together into a written summary.
Often readers make errors & without any prompting, work on the text in some way to self-correct the errors.
It’s as if they had a feeling that something wasn’t quite right.
This is usually interesting, especially when we look at what happens across the entire record.
Pattern – this statement about the sources of information used and neglected is useful to guide subsequent teaching.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

16. Interpreting the Running Record (cont)
Some common faults
Analysis of meaning, structure and visual information is of little value unless done carefully.
Consider the sentence only up to the error
(not the unread text).
3 The total number of M, S or V circles are a guide to what is being neglected, what is made a priority, and when the reader can combine different kinds of processing.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000

17. Understanding the Reading Process
When we ask ourselves, ‘What does my record tell me?’ we bring our own beliefs about literacy & our own background of professional experience to the interpretation.
In older readers look for different signs of progress sometimes there is more repetition as the older reader tries
to rephrase or regroup words.
But: the behaviour record would still look the same because it comes from extensive research into what readers do as they read text.
Remember:
Record information in full to enable better interpretation.
Poor observation will reduce the number of errors & inflate the accuracy score.
Reliability drops as accuracy levels fall because there is more error to be recorded.
Observation of poor readers is difficult & requires rigorous training to reach agreement on scoring because of the complexity of the error behaviour.
The most reliable records are obtained by scoring an observation immediately following manual recording.
Sometimes there is more repetition as the older reader tries to regroup words into phrases.
Much of the ‘out loud’ self-correcting process goes underground i.e; reader is correcting errors in their head before saying them.
If the teacher introduces a more challenging text, the process of self-correcting may reappear.
Clay, Marie M., 'Running Records for Classroom Teachers' , Heinemann 2000