The article I chose was “Poetry and Writing: Improving Fluency and Motivation For Students With Developmental Dyslexic Traits” by Dr. Benita Bruster, Professor of Education and Interim Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Tennessee. The article was based on Dr. Bruster’s work in a fourth grade ELA classroom with a small group of students who had been selected by their classroom teachers because they were struggling readers (Bruster, 2015). In her article, Dr. Bruster explains that she was a volunteer who was “interested in literacy” (Bruster, 2015, p.93) and was approached by the classroom teacher to work with five boys during “their regular small group reading time” (Bruster, 2015, p.93) for a period of nine weeks). She goes on to explain that the boys selected for the intervention were identified as demonstrating characteristics of “developmental dyslexia” (Bruster, 2015, p.94) based on “work samples supplied by the
Me and My Reading Profile: A Tool for Assessing Early Reading Motivation (portrait of my daughter, Tess, age 7, reading her favorite series Ivy and Bean ) The article "Me and My Reading Profile" by Marinek, Malloy, Gambrell, and Mazzoni (2015) discusses the value of assessing a young reader's motivation. It states that motivation plays as vital a role in reading achievement as other key skills (such as decoding and comprehension), yet motivation is rarely addressed in grades K-2. The authors go on to state that it is necessary to measure young students' interest in developmentally appropriate ways so that "literacy instruction can be designed with motivation in mind" (Marinak et. al. p. 52) and propose that they have created a useful tool with which to gauge students' interest in reading. Marinek et. al. (2015) state that "Without attention to reading motivation, some students may never reach their full reading potential&qu