Assessment of a Special Child

Written Language Case Study

Clint is a seventh-grade student is Mrs. Cook’s classroom, receiving special education services for written language. He receives specialized instruction for 40 min each day in a small group setting (Tier 3). Currently, Mrs. Cook uses an evidence-based practice to support Clint and his classmates in developing their writing skills. This program focuses on: 

● the writing process
● writing both narrative and informational text genres
● Vocabulary development
● writing mechanics such as grammar and punctuation

According to Clint’s individualized education plan (IEP), he requires specially designed instruction in written language and primarily struggles with text generation and self-regulation. His progress in his IEP written language goal has been monitored with curriculum-based measurement (CBM) story prompt and is scored using correct word sequences (CWS). This progress monitoring measure and scoring metric have empirical evidence of being sensitive to student growth within eight weeks (Hampton & Lembke, 2016; McMaster, Du, Yeo, Deno, Parker, & Ellis, 2011) . During the first week of instruction, Mrs. Cook gave Clint three story prompt probes and took the median of these scores to determine Clint’s baseline, which was 42 CWS. Then, local norms were used to determine a reasonable yet ambitious goal for Clint to reach (60 CWS), indicated by the goal line below. 



Clint has been making growth in his writing skill, yet when the eight-point decision rule is applied, it appears that an instructional change needs to be made. Because of this, Mrs. Cook decides to make an instructional change to increase Clint’s growth. She uses The Taxonomy of Intervention Intensity (Fuchs, Fuchs & Malone, 2017) to help guide her decision-making, along with other forms of data gathered from informal observations and formative and summative assessments collected during her class. According to these data, Mrs. Cook makes the following observations:

● Clint has excellent attendance and participation in class.
● Clint appears to enjoy writing and often has lots of ideas about what he wants to write. When given a writing task, he will often begin right away and is usually able to keep going until he decides the task is complete. However, when given time to edit and revise his work, Clint will often simply reread his writing, maybe making minor edits such as fixing spelling, and then state that he is finished.
● Clint doesn’t appear to often use the 30 sec of planning time prior to his weekly CBM probe and instead seems to sit and wait for the writing to start, often flipping or tapping his pencil during this time or asking if he can “just start writing.”
● When completing longer writing assignments, Clint does a good job of writing in paragraphs, but the ordering of his paragraphs often doesn’t make sense and leaves the reader slightly confused. His paragraphs are also rather short and his sentences are mostly simple.
● Clint’s handwriting is neat and fluent.

When reflecting on the intensity dimensions found in The Taxonomy (Fuchs et al., 2017), Mrs. Cook feels that many of the dimensions are being met well. In particular, strength, dosage, and comprehensiveness she feels are being met sufficiently. The instructional program she is using has lots of research supporting its efficacy to improve writing for students in grades two through ten with learning disabilities in written language with moderate effect sizes. The program also allows for many opportunities to respond and receive corrective feedback and includes a large number of explicit instructional principles. However, Mrs. Cook feels that it could be individualized to a greater extent to meet the unique needs of Clint by increasing the alignment. To ensure she had been implementing the intervention with high fidelity, Mrs. Cook took a video of herself teaching and compared her implementation to that outlined in the teaching manual and determined she has been teaching with high fidelity. Therefore, although the instructional program is fairly well aligned with Clint’s specific needs in text generation and self-regulation, Mrs. Cook hypothesizes that he needs additional instruction and support for planning and organizing as well as revising his writing. Given that planning and organizing his writing seems to be a foundational need for Clint, Mrs. Cook decides to focus on this aspect of writing for the instructional change. She knows that research has supported the use of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) to supplement larger writing curricula, such as the EBP she is currently using, and that SRSD includes specific strategies to support planning and organizing, so she decides to make an instructional change and adds SRSD to the current instruction she is delivering. Specifically, she will use SRSD to teach Clint the POW + TREE strategy and how to use the accompanying graphic organizer. POW + TREE stands for: Pick my idea, Organize my notes, Write and say more, Topic sentence, Reasons (3 or more), Explain reasons, Ending.

Reflection Questions

1. Clint’s progress monitoring graph showed that he was making progress during the “Intervention 1” phase, even though the slope of his trendline was less than the slope of his goal line. Despite this, Mrs. Cook decided to make an instructional change. Was this the correct course of action to take? Why or why not?
2. Explain why it is best practice to use the median of three probes to establish a baseline rather than taking the mean of the three probes.
3. What evidence pointed Mrs. Cook to the conclusion that Clint needed additional supports and instruction for planning and organizing as well as revising his work? Explain.
4. Calculate the slope of Intervention 1 and Intervention 2. Show your work.
   Slope = (y2 – y1) / (x2 – x1)
   a. The score on the first probe (y1)
   b. The score on the last probe (y2)
   c. The first administration time point (x1)
   d. The last administration time point (x2)
5. Based on Clint’s progress monitoring graph, does he appear to be responding sufficiently to Intervention 2? How do you know?
6. Based on Clint’s progress monitoring graph, should Mrs. Cook make an instructional decision right now (after week 16)? Why or why not?
7. If Clint continues to consistently score above the goal line, after which week will Mrs. Cook be able to make the next instructional decision and what decision will the data suggest she make?
8. Mrs. Cook is beginning to use the POW-TREE strategy to help Clint organize and plan his writing. What environmental or behavioral supports might she use to facilitate Clint’s independence in his attention, focus, and organization during the intervention?