Running records and you - Running records - Ongoing assessment for reading

If you teach in North Carolina, you are already “doing” running records. Your school mandates them as a means of assessing student reading. Hopefully you received some training for these assessments, but if your experience was like that of many teachers, you were not given ample background on why the assessment was necessary or useful, nor were you given adequate instruction in their administration. As a result, although you may find running records to be valuable time spent with individual students once in a while, you may also believe that all these individualized assessments are taking up valuable class time — time when you feel you could be teaching.

If administered thoughtfully and carefully, running records can be tremendously valuable tools in assessing students’ progress in reading. This article explains what running records are, how to administer them, and how to use them for ongoing classroom assessment to improve your teaching of individual students.

What is a running record?

If Running Records are taken in a systematic way they provide evidence of how well children are learning to direct their knowledge of letters, sounds or words.¹

A running record, a Reading Recovery assessment developed by Marie Clay, is a means of documenting a student’s individual reading of a continuous text. A running record can provide a way to assess an individual student’s reading, determine appropriate levels of text for reading, and to inform teaching. Taken at intervals, these records can show growth over time in reading skills.

Teachers of students in grades kindergarten through twelfth grade are frequently asked to administer running records and may even have a schedule by which students should be assessed. This assessment is time-consuming at first but becomes easier and quicker with practice and proper training. Teachers who master the taking of running records will be able to make powerful observations that can serve as immediate or long-term teaching tools. As noted by Peter Johnston, learning to administer running records and even to interpret running records is not merely the acquisition of the skills of symbolic note taking to document a child’s reading. Taking running records and incorporating running records into a classroom program means an acceptance of a whole way of thinking about the process of learning to read.²