Running Record With a Comprehension–Accuracy Gap
Ms. Alvarez listens to Marcus, a third grader, read a 150-word passage from a leveled reader. He finishes in 1 minute 25 seconds with 12 miscues: 9 substitutions (e.g., "huge" for "hugely," "discover" for "discovery"), 2 omissions of the last word in a line, and 1 repetition. He self-corrects 2 of the substitutions. Accuracy works out to 92%. On the retell he names the characters, the problem, and three events in order, and he answers all four inferential questions correctly. On last month's grade-level benchmark his accuracy was 89% with a similarly strong retell. Ms. Alvarez has to decide by Friday whether to move Marcus up a level, hold him here, or drop him back before the next running-record cycle.
1. Compute Marcus's reading rate, interpret the accuracy figure, and decide whether to move him up, hold, or drop back. Justify the decision with the data.
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Rate: 150 words in 85 seconds = about 106 words per minute, which is within the typical third-grade range but on the lower side.
Accuracy: 92% places the text in the instructional band (roughly 90–94%); 95–100% would be independent and below 90% frustrational. So the text is challenging but appropriate - it is not yet a text he can read on his own.
What the miscues say: 9 of 12 miscues are inflectional-ending substitutions that keep the sentence's meaning (huge/hugely, discover/discovery). His comprehension is intact, so the bottleneck is word-level, not meaning-making.
Decision: hold at this level. Moving up risks pushing accuracy under 90% and removing the very word endings he needs to practice; dropping back is unwarranted because 92% is not frustration and his retell is strong. Flag the two omissions to check whether they occur at line ends (a return-sweep issue) rather than a decoding one.
2. Design the instructional focus for the next two weeks. What will you teach, what will you deliberately not spend time on, and how will you monitor progress?
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Teach (10–12 min/day): explicit morphology work on suffixes that change the base word. Build word families from bases he already reads (huge → hugely, discover → discovery, care → carefully) and sort them by what happens to the base: nothing added, final e dropped, y changed to i. Have him read the sorted words in isolation and then find them in the day's text.
Do not spend the core block on comprehension strategies. His retell and inferential answers show comprehension is a strength; strategy lessons would displace the instruction he actually needs. Keep comprehension alive through discussion of grade-level read-alouds.
Fluency: one 1-minute rereading per day of an already-read page to nudge rate and prosody, not as the main event.
Monitor: a weekly 100-word accuracy check on unseen text at this level, plus a check that he reads the endings (not just the base) when the word is presented alone. Move him up only when accuracy on unseen text at this level reaches 95% with comprehension intact.
3. Name two pieces of additional data you would collect before finalizing the plan, and explain what each would change.
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Where the two omissions fall. If both occur at the end of a line, the likely cause is inefficient return sweep or tracking, not decoding. That would change the plan: I would add phrasing/fluency work with pre-marked text rather than more phonics.
Whether he reads the endings in isolation. Ask him to read hugely, carefully, and discovery as single words. If he reads them correctly alone but drops them in context, the issue is attention to print or rate, not knowledge of the suffix - which shifts the emphasis toward slowing down and self-monitoring rather than re-teaching the suffix. If he misses them in isolation too, the suffix instruction is confirmed as the right target.
A third useful check is prosody on a familiar reread, since flat, word-by-word reading would suggest rate is suppressing accuracy.