EDUC 560 Sean Case Study - A Teacher's Portfolio by Layne ... · Microsoft Word - EDUC 560 Sean Case Study

Layne C. Smith Education 560 Case Study: Sean a Student At Windermere Elementary School

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Introduction The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary analysis of the results of the “reading buddy” activity

had on Sean a student in the Upper Arlington School District, Upper Arlington, Ohio. Judy Schnoor,

Upper Arlington School District, and Dr. Cindy Bowman of Ashland University, Columbus Center,

coordinated the “reading buddy” exercise. The correspondence began on September 2 and ended on

September 27. Sean wrote eight letters including one bio-poem in response to the nine letters I had

written to him. The topic of the writings was from Jerry Spinelli’s book Wringer. The intent of the study

was to encourage my “reading buddy,” Sean, to write about what he had read from questions I had posed

in my correspondence to him. These questions were to help Sean think about and write about a personal

connection he may have either to the characters or to the setting as we read the book together. Ideally,

Sean would have latched on to something that piqued his interest in the story and expand on it through

his writing.

This paper includes three sections that contain copies of marked-up notes I had made as I was preparing

for this study. The first section “Response Notes” contains highlighted copies of questions I had posed to

Sean and copies of letters from Sean responding to my previous letter to him during our month long

correspondence. Tabular and graph data are included to show how I parsed the letters into data, that

hopefully, provides some meaningful results. The second section “Notes” contains all copies of letters

from Sean in which I did my first round of making notes and word counts from his letters and his bio-

poem. A graph summarizing the word counts are included. The third section “Correspondences” contains

all the original letters from Sean and non marked-up copies of my letters to Sean.

My Impression of Sean Sean attends Mrs. Schnoor’s 5th grade class at Windermere Elementary School in the Upper Arlington

School District. He has two brothers and one sister, Matt, Jacob and Paige. Jacob, Paige and Sean are

triplets. Sean is the youngest child in the family. He enjoys playing lacrosse, doing stunt riding on his

bicycle, and playing video games. One of his favorite movies is Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith and

one of his favorite books is Millions and is currently reading Hatchet. From his letters, I have the

impression Sean does get excited about reading new books. Sean has interests to the outside world. He

would like to visit Australia and see the “biggest waterfall in the world.” Sean is a fun loving boy who

enjoys being with his family and friends. Moreover, he believes that friends need to be kind to each other.

For example, Sean was not too keen of how one character, Beans was treating Dorothy and expressed

his satisfaction that eventually Palmer and Dorothy became friends. However, he does fear violence. In

his bio-poem, he mentions that he fears that someone will point a gun at him and his brother. In Wringer,

he is sympathetic to the main character’s dislike of wanting to wring (kill) birds.


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Number of Words Written In Selected Paragraphs From Letters Written by Sean From September 2-27, 2005

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

Total 27 42 43 50 36 46 53 48

Avg 9.00 14.00 14.30 16.67 12.00 15.33 17.66 16.00

2-Sep 13-Sep 14-Sep 15-Sep 16-Sep 19-Sep 20-Sep 27-Sep

Description of Responses Ascertaining Sean’s “T-Unit”

In general, the T-unit length is a measure of syntactic complexity and cognitive maturity in a writer.

Therefore, less-experienced writers tend to conjoin shorter sentences. In my analysis, I concocted my

version of the “T-Unit” by simply counting the number of words in a three-sentence paragraph, and then

calculated the average by counting the number of all words in a paragraph and then dividing by three.

Therefore, I determined the average number of words per sentence for each letter I received from Sean

during the study period. As can be seen in the chart below, the average number of words written by Sean

in each letter increased. From September 2-13, the average improved by five words. However, the letter

of September 16 was

4.67 words less than the

previous day at 16.67

words. A few days later,

the average number of

words written jumped

back up again to 15.33

words for September 19

and 17.66 (the highest

average) for September

20. The decline on

September 16 may be

due to writing fatigue (he

wrote four letters in four days) because three days later the average rises once again. As seen in the

graph, the red trend line is upward sloping then flattens out. I believe the data shows that Sean was an

active and enthusiastic reader of Wringer and he enjoyed writing about it.

Directed Responses Description of Elements The table below summarizes the six elements used to evaluate “Directed Responses” section of the case

study. In the column, “Questions Asked” lists the number of direct and indirect questions posed in my

letters to Sean during the study period. As indicated, I had asked 41 questions, averaging almost six

questions per letter. In the “Questions Answered” column lists the number of answers, directly and

indirectly, responded to by Sean. As shown in the table, Sean answered 12 questions, averaging almost

two per letter. The “Key Points” column is the number of summation statements Sean had written in his


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letters to me about Wringer. Sean wrote eight key points for an average of little more than one key point

per letter. The number of “Misspelled Words” column tabulation was not critical of his spelling ability

but to gauge his

attention to detail

in his writing.

Sean had

misspelled 15

words for an

average of two

words per letter.

The “Personal

Connections”

category is a

tabulation of the

number of instances that Sean related an element of the story to his own personal experiences. In his

letters, I highlighted four instances of Sean making a personal connection to Palmer, the main character

in the story. A “Descriptive Sentences” category identified the sentences that expressed Sean’s interest in

a particular passage of the story. The detail he writes about in passages from the book and by his careful

spelling of difficult words denotes a descriptive sentence.

Elements 1 & 2: Questions Asked and Questions Answered Analysis As seen from the table above Sean answered 29% of the questions posed to him during the study period.

Not knowing the metrics of how other students responded to questions posed to them through our

correspondences to Mrs. Schnoors’s fifth grade class, I cannot compare this percentage to other “reading

buddy” students. However, I will attempt to make some reasonable conclusions about Sean from the

findings.

The highest number of written responses to questions posed to Sean was at the beginning and at the end

of the “reading buddy” activity. Sean wrote no responses to questions from September 14-16. It is my

impression that Sean became more concerned about writing summaries of the readings then thoughtful

reflection on what had transpired in a particular chapter of the book. This fatigue in responding to

questions ended September 16 ostensibly because there was more time to write. Many of the written

responses from Sean did latch onto a certain aspect of the story. For example, the friendship between

Palmer and Dorothy piqued Sean’s interest. In his first letter about Wringer September 13 letter, Sean

demonstrated his enthusiasm for reading and writing as exemplified by the picture he drew depicting

Palmer and the pigeon.

Date

# Questions Asked

# Questions Answered

# of Key Points

# of Misspelled Words

# of Personal Connections

# of Descriptive Sentences

13-Sep 4 4 0 2 3 0

14-Sep 4 0 0 2 1 2

15-Sep 7 0 0 1 0 1

16-Sep 3 0 0 2 0 2

19-Sep 10 2 1 5 0 1

20-Sep 8 1 3 1 0 0

27-Sep 5 5 4 2 0 0

Total 41 12 8 15 4 6

Avg/Letter 5.86 1.71 1.14 2.14 0.57 0.86


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Element 3: Key Point Analysis The letters from September 19-20 and 27 demonstrated Sean’s ability to identify and summarize the

important parts of the story. He correctly used proper quotation marks in his letter to identify a key

passage from chapters 17-22. In his September 20 letter, Sean identified three points that were crucial to

the outcome of the story. In the September 27 letter, his author’s study, Sean identified four key points

about the story. I paraphrased what Sean wrote: (1) friendships change over time, (2) making choices

about the friends you do have, (3) deciding on what is the right thing to do may not be popular with friends

and family, (4) doing the right thing is important.

Element 4: Misspelled Words Analysis As can be seen from the above table, Sean averaged two misspellings per letter, may be viewed as a

measure of how careful a writer Sean is, or can be. The anomaly of the September 19 letter contained

five misspelled words, many of which the letters were transposed when he wrote them. However, Sean

does exhibit knowledge of and usually applies correct punctuation to the sentences he writes.

Element 5: Personal Connections Analysis

A disappointing aspect of Sean’s writing about Wringer was the lack of making personal responses (text-

to-text, text to self, text to society) to the story. He made four personal connections to the entire book.

(Note: the number of times I had asked Sean “open-ended questions” to make personal connections is

highlighted and documented in this study). However, Sean’s modified “T-Unit” score had a positive trend,

averaging an increase of two words per sentence with each letter he wrote. This happened because Sean

spent his time writing summative letters, corroborated by the number of “key points” in his letters (eight)

versus four for “personal connections.” The four personal connections made were early on in the

“reading buddy” program, exemplifying his enthusiasm for reading new books and for the “reading buddy”

assignment.

Sean makes three distinct personal connections to the story in his September 13 letter. He does this by,

as mentioned earlier, (1) making a interpretive drawing of Palmer and the pigeon as a header to his letter;

(2) writing about, albeit briefly, his 9th birthday party and how it differed from Palmer’s birthday party; (3)

reacting to what a wringer is and says “that would be a bad job for me because I like birds”. At the end of

the letter, he asks “Would you like to have that job?”

Element 6: Descriptive Sentence Analysis

Letters written from September 14-19 contained six sentences conveying an imaginative quality. For

example, the September 14 letter contained two descriptive sentences, covering chapters 5-8 of Wringer.

In describing the “treatment,” Sean wrote, “riding down the slide stacked and head first.” In trying to


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understand what Palmer is thinking, Sean wrote, “He went back in his mind and remembered what his

mom said about slides.”

Evaluation of Growth Sean’s formation of sentences and word usage, on average, increased with each correspondence, for the

first few days then flattened out when the letter writing stopped. When given the time to think about the

story, Sean writes descriptive sentences and provides personal responses to what he has read. I believe

Sean enjoys reading new books. From the data, Sean exhibits this enthusiasm, in the first few days, by

providing personal insights of what he has read and by the number of words, he writes in his sentences.

However, Sean does exhibit fatigue in his letter writing, when he writes everyday. His capacity to write

about a personal connection to the story waned significantly after the second letter. Although the average

number of words written in his sentences (14.38) only dropped once from his September 16 letter, the

other category, “Key Points” increased significantly, illustrating the tendency to write factual summaries

about the chapters read.

This was troubling to me for two reasons. First, it showed that Sean concentrated his writing on

summarizing chapters rather than giving his personal insight about the story. The several questions I had

posed to him, asking him to think about what he had read, and then to write a reflective sentence on what

he had read was overlooked. Second, it became clear to me that one of the major tenets of the study,

analyzing the writing and scoping the quality of the responses, was not tenable.

I would encourage Sean to do independent reading on topics that he is passionate about (i.e. lacrosse,

extreme biking, waterfalls, being one of three triplets in his family, Australia, etc) and have him express

his personal connection to what he reads by having him discuss it in small groups and then for him to

write about it. I believe Sean understands what it means to make a personal connection to what he has

read, but he needs a model on how to write about making this connection so that his writing expresses

more detail about what he is thinking. It is my pleasure in being Sean’s “reading buddy” for a month. It is

my impression that Sean is a hard-working student who possesses the ability to do above average work.


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EDUC 560 Sean Case Study - A Teacher's Portfolio by Layne ... · Microsoft Word - EDUC 560 Sean Case Study