A (More) Holistic Running Record

For RtI, we asked our teachers to do a current running record on students to find their reading levels. A Running Record is a quick and easy assessment of your students' reading level using any ol' sheet of paper. The process can be a bit intimidating at first. Many teachers learn how to do a running record in their teaching credential program, however it takes practice to learn how to do a running record well.

One of the issues with a running record is that you can do a running record, but it is usually used to assess a students' miscues (errors made). However, running records do not strategically take into account students' comprehension ability.

We ran into problems when we asked our teachers to do running records on their students. Our school has 95% English Language Learners (ELL students). Theoretically, listening to a student's oral reading habits can tell you if they are a good reader. And for most populations, fluency ability is the best predictor of a student's reading ability- comprehension included. But for ELL students this is not the case.

A running record can tell you how well a student can decode and read words. But often a student with a developing sense of the English language can decode words will either less or more skill than his/her comprehension ability. For example, I can decode Spanish, but I probably could only catch a general gist of what I read in Spanish, because I have a poor vocabulary base in Spanish. And this is true of many of our ELL students with English. I also have several students that have poor decoding ability (students with little sense of phonics/word parts in English), and these students can decode poorly, but they can comprehend well.

Ahhh! There are myriad factors in teaching reading well, eh?

All that to say....I've found this Running Record that includes comprehension and fluency rubrics. So if you're one of those teachers with an ELL student (50%+ of our state!), try using these rubrics. Perhaps this will help you assess your students more accurately. You should be able to download this pdf file. Enjoy!


Running Record Template

Read on!