CASE STUDIES

STUDENT A

Student A is a student with an IEP classified with a learning disability in a general education classroom. She has a clear understanding of rules, routines and shows initiative by her everyday willingness to participate and speak. She is a great student that when given praise, will produce good work. On a daily basis, Student A is always smiling, engaging with others to help out in tasks. She has a shy demeanor though is eager to say thoughts in class and communicate to others what the task is. Even if she may be confused herself, she tries her best to help out everyone else. Student A shows initiative by trying to complete her work independently; however, sometimes needs to be placed in small groups and have chunked worksheets for further understanding of content.

PRE-DIAGNOSTIC

POST-DIAGNOSTIC

According to her pre-diagnostic, she scored an overall Grade 6 reading level. This means this students is one grade level below. This students strengths include phonics and high-frequency words. This student struggle with Vocabulary, Comprehension of Literature and Comprehension of Information Text. Due to the fact this student scored low in Vocabulary: Grade 4, instruction focuses on helping this student succeed with Vocabulary by provided chunked, broken down worksheets with root words, moments to rephrase questions and opportunity to connect concepts to oneself.

In the first worksheet title 'Implicit vs. Explicit Evidence", we see the student struggled with answering the question "Provide a time when someone demonstrated strength "on the low" and "out loud with more than one sentence. Before a student can comprehend literature and informational text, they must be able to focus on Vocabulary. In the bottom of Page 1, we see a Key Vocabulary section where this student worked in a small group to come up with a class definition for Implicit and Explicit. An Iceberg was used as an analogy to help this student visualize explicitness vs. implicitness. This student also received prefixes in order to understand vocabulary.

On the second worksheet, we see a Do Now where the student chose Option #1 and said how someone altered their thinking in a positive way. We see here the student is starting to elaborate more than "Implicit vs. Explicit Evidence". With a focus on vocabulary, in the bottom, this student was asked to rephrase 'How can I find dialogue that propels conflict in order for the character to develop?" while having to find definitions for 'Dialogue', 'Propel', 'Conflict', and 'Develop'. This student was able to find definitions and successfully rephrase the target question as "How can we find ways that the words to push forward a problem for the person to grow?"

On the third worksheet, we see a chunked worksheet for "Interpreting Character Change Beginning with Conflict". This was given also understanding the overall question on the second worksheet. This is where the student begins to work to comprehend literature. The 'Do Now' was chunked so this student utilize their own experiences to answer Option #2. This is a chunked version of understand how the events in the story and dialogue works to puh a problem to help the character grow. Then, the student was given a question to rephrase in their own words.

In the Post-Diagnostic, we see this student makes massive improvement. Their vocabulary goes from "Grade 4" to Grade 6", Their Comprehension of Literature is in "Mid 7 and Comprehension of Informational Text is in "Early 7".

STUDENT B

Student B is a student in a general education classroom. They are someone who always gets the work done regardless of what is going on around them. They have a strong work ethic. They also have a quiet demeanor. This student is reluctant to participate in class but always gets the work completed. On a daily basis, this person is observed to speak to the same people. Student B shows initiative by getting all the work done independently and understanding material, however, needs support in pushing their analysis and elaboration beyond literal interpretation. In their writing, the explanation runs vague and does not precisely explain how the evidence connects back to the claim.

PRE-ASSESSMENT
EVALUATING AUTHORS ARGUMENT

POST-ASSESSMENT
EVALUATING AUTHOR ARGUMENT

In their Pre-Assessment Essay, this student shows great usage of conventions, strong use of organization, structure, the ability to make a claim and support it with evidence and explanation. However, this students struggles with a precise claim and analysis and explanation in how an author's argument is stronger than the other. This student says 'We can see that the author give us various examples...with strong evidence and examples..." but does not explain exactly how this author does this.

This student was first given the task of "Evaluating our Pre-Test 3 Essays" which asks to craft a checklist of what is needed in the prompt and a rubric. This will allow them to visualize the difference between a three and a four. This student writes Relevant evidence utilized" and rates an anonymous essay a "2" with only one piece of evidence and suggests they "could have elaborated more for the second reason" (Pages 1-2). We see the student understands evidence needs elaboration but still needs support in explaining how.

This students works through "Ethos, Logos, Pathos" through how can they work to make their analysis stronger with Ethos, Logos, Pathos (Page 3), rating their classmates answer (Page 4), developing their own argument about Money, Time or Knowledge (Page 4), and Providing glows and grows and ways of improving an argument through Ethos, Logos, Pathos (Pages 5 and 6).

In their Post-Assessment essay, we see this student improve upon explaining how the author makes their argument stronger with the use of Ethos, Logos and Pathos. We see the claim become stronger from the Pre-Assessment to the Post-Assessment: "..."Stop the Fracking! has the stronger argument because of the author's use of logic, pathos along with the strong arguments stated as opposed to the pros side" (Post-Assessment, Page 1). This is a lot more precise and stronger than "...because of the serious examples they give us and word choices" (Pre-Assessment, Page 1). In terms of explaining how an author makes their argument stronger, this student shows improvement. In the Post-Assessment, we see the analysis states the following: "Opposed to the pros side, the use of pathos shows that workers now have resulted in lung cancer which make the readers feel a type of sympathetic feeling...The pros side gives us great claims and logical knowledge, but it does not compare to the pathos, rebuttals, and logic the pros side has given us" (Post, Page 2). We see this student is now explaining HOW the author makes the argument stronger with pathos and logos.