Dear Parents/Guardians,

I have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to work with your child throughout this year in reading. It was a wonderful year filled with fantastic learning opportunities and fun-filled reading adventures.

As you know from my letter in the fall, this was my final year of a doctoral program in Educational Leadership with a concentration in literacy at the University of Delaware. I conducted my research this late fall/ early winter in my four reading classes. I explored using inquiry to improve inferential thinking and writing. I designed and implemented two units of instruction in order to achieve this goal. One unit centered on developing an understanding of what an inference is and the other unit focused on applying this understanding to literature. The literature units centered around the texts, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin and The 39 Clues: The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan.

The students took a pre-test before the units and a post-test after the units. Both assessments asked students to record their inferences as they read a passage in a graphic organizer and then use the organizer to write a character analysis essay. The pretest and the posttest were then scored and analyzed. Significant differences and gains were noted for both the graphic organizer scores and the essay scores. The greatest instructional effect was shown in all classes with the essay scores. In other words, the students made gains in their ability to write inferences about characters and support them with evidence in an essay. The data suggests that further strategies should be implemented to teach students that what they write in a graphic organizer, such as a Venn Diagram or T-chart, should be expanded upon when they write in a final essay. These results were included in my final defense this spring. Over Memorial Day weekend, I received my doctorate. Thank you for your support, feedback, and understanding throughout the course of this year and especially during this study.

I challenged my students to summarize their year in six words. In closing, I will leave you with a snapshot of eighteen words they shared with me.

Reading was awesome because I learned.

First, exciting, then hard, then fun.

5th grade changed the way I read.

Sincerely,

Dr. Kathryn McDermott

610-240-1200 x2340