RICA Quick Check 2

An eighth grade teacher wants to help students improve their spelling of scientific vocabulary, including the terms listed below: barometer, centimeter, dehydrate, hydrogen, microscope, telescope, thermal, thermometer. Which of the following instructional strategies is likely to be most effective for this purpose?

• Showing students how to divide scientific terms into syllables to facilitate accurate spelling

• conducting practice drills to help students memorize the irregular spelling patterns of words

• familiarizing students with the spelling and meaning of Greek morphemes in scientific terms

• helping students determine correct spellings by dividing the words into onsets and rimes.

A fourth grade student who reads grade level narrative texts with fluency and excellent comprehension is struggling to read a grade-level content area passage about a topic with which the student is familiar. The student reads the passage hesitantly, frequently stopping to reread clauses or entire sentences. Afterward, the student demonstrates limited comprehension of what was read. Which of the following factors is more likely disrupting the student's fluent reading of the text?

• Insufficient background knowledge to support basic comprehension of the text

• lack of experience with the academic language structures used in the text

• insufficient monitoring of comprehension while reading the text

• lack of grade level word analysis skills for accurate decoding of the words in the text

A second grader has demonstrated the ability to decode individual words accurately, but she reads very slowly and laboriously. When the teacher tries to engage the student in oral reading activities, she says she feels embarrassed and would rather read silently. Which of the following modifications to instruction would be most appropriate and effective for helping this student improve her reading fluency.

• encouraging her to serve as an audience for other students' oral reading until she demonstrates willingness to read aloud herself

• having her reread text several times using whisper reading to build her fluency and confidence with respect to the text

• teaching her how to use self-monitoring as she reads to improve her literal comprehension and ability to read with prosody

• providing her with explicit phonics instruction to improve her word identification skills before requiring her to read aloud