Assessing Dependent Readers' Needs

Beers states in this chapter, "Once we can define what's working and what isn't working, then we know how instruction should proceed."(24).  What she explains, is that there are different confidences in reading that effect the way a person reads.  These three areas consist of cognitive confidence, text confidence, and social and emotional confidence.  By identifying which area or areas are being struggled with, we can narrow down the problem of the struggling reader.  This made me think back to our class last week when did the timed readings.  Once we each took our reading test we had to evaluate our fluency and comprehension.  I realized that the quicker I read, the less I payed attention to what I was actually reading.  I had never noticed before that I did not always comprehend what I was reading when I read at a quicker pace.  This was something that I could work on and improve, now that I identified a weakness of mine.  This realization afirms Beers idea of first identifying the problem to solve it.