Running Records & Strategies

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Running Records provide an assessment of text reading, and are designed to be taken as a child reads orally from any text. If Running Records are taken in a systematic way, they provide evidence of how well children are directing their knowledge of letters, sounds, and words to understanding the messages in the text. Records are taken to guide teaching. Running Records capture what the readers said and did while reading texts or books. Having taken the record, teachers can review what happened and develop lessons to help students continue to progress.

Teaching For Strategies:

Strategies are cognitive actions initiated by the reader to construct meaning from the text. We cannot observe (i.e., in-the-head processes), but we can collect evidence of reading behavior that indicates a child is engaging in mental problem-solving. Children who are employing strategies as they read are engaged in what Clay (1991) refers to as "reading work." From Clay's research with young readers, we know that effective readers are constantly

Predicting upcoming actions.
Using pictures to support meaning.
Anticipating language structures.
Making links to their own personal knowledge.
Monitoring by rereading.
Cross-checking one source of information with another.
Searching to extract further information with another.
Correcting themselves when cues do not match.
Reading fluently and expressively.
Problem-solving flexibility according to different purposes and changing contexts.

All of these processes are brought into play efficiently and automatically by the strategic reader. However, the low-process reader has developed a processing system that is either ineffective or inefficient. In planning the child's literacy program it is critical that the teacher observe and take notice of which strategic operations the child is initiating and which ones she or he is neglecting.

To examine strategic use, the teacher will analyze the running record and look closely at cues that were used or ignored by the reader (see Clay's [1993] Observational Survey for how to use running records; also Johnston 1992). The teacher must determine whether the child employed a strategy to help her actively make predictions based on other information. To that end the teacher examines the running record for evidence of what the child did at the point of difficulty:

Did the child stop at an unknown word and make no attempt?
Did the child appeal for help?
Did the child reread to gather more information?
Did the child articulate the first letter of the problem word?
Was the child using meaning cues (semantics), structural cues (syntax), visual cues (graphophonics), or some combination of these?

Important Reading strategies for beginning readers:

Early Strategies

Directional movement
One-to-one matching
Locating known words in text
Locating unknown words in text

Higher level strategies

Use or multiple cue system

Meaning (semantic)
Structure (syntactic)
Visual (graphophonic)
Self-Monitoring
Self-Correcting

Prompts to Support the Use of Strategies:

To support the control of early reading behaviors:

Read it with your finger.
Did you have enough (or too many) words?
Did it match?
Were there enough words?
Did you run out of words?
Try ___. Would that make sense?
Try ___. Would that sound right?
Do you think it looks like ___?
Can you find ___? (a known or new word)
Read that again and start the word.

To support the reader's use of self-monitoring or checking behavior:

Were you right?
Where's the tricky word? (after an error)
What did you notice? (after a hesitation or stop)
What's wrong?
Why did you stop?
What letter would you expect to see at the beginning? at the end?
Would ___ fit there?
Would ___ make sense?
Do you think it looks like ___?
Could it be ___?
It could be ___, but look at ___.
Check it. Does it look right and sound right to you?
You almost got that. See if you can find out what is wrong.
Try that again.

To support the reader's use of all sources of information:

Check the picture.
Does that make sense? Does that look right?
Does that sound right?
You said (....). Can we say it that way?
You said (....). Does that make sense?
What's wrong with this? (repeat what the child said)
Try that again and try to think what would make sense.
Try that again and think what would sound right.
Do you know a word like that?
Do you know a word that starts with those letters?
What could you try?
Do you know that might help?
What can you do to help yourself?

To support the reader's self-correction behavior:

Something wasn't quite right.
Try that again.
I liked the way you worked that out.
You made a mistake. Can you find it?
You're nearly right. Try that again.

To support phrased, fluent reading:

Can you read this quickly?
Put your words together so it sounds like talking.

The goal is for children eventually to consider these questions themselves as they use all sources of information in an integrated way to read with phrasing and fluency. The teacher needs to learn to prompt with just the right amount of support. As the child gains more strategic control, the teacher's level of support will lessen. This change over time will enable the child to take over the processing for himself. (Fountas and Pinnell, 1996)

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