CI 313 Module 3 Application Task: Danielle's IEP Goals and Strategies

This homework assignment presents an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for Danielle, a first-grade student facing challenges in reading and writing. The assignment begins with a detailed description of Danielle, her family, her strengths, and her struggles, including feedback from her teacher and her mother. It then outlines three specific IEP goals: decoding, fluency, and vocabulary, aligning with academic standards. For each goal, the assignment specifies measurable objectives. Furthermore, the assignment suggests three intervention strategies: Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), teacher read-alouds, and Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI), explaining how these strategies support the IEP goals and providing rationales for their effectiveness, supported by research and citations. The rationale for each intervention strategy is provided, emphasizing the importance of evidence-based practices in special education. The assignment concludes by referencing relevant research to support the chosen interventions.

Running head: IEP GOALS
IEP GOALS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1IEP GOALS
Student description
Danielle, a student of first grade, is a girl struggling with her reading and writing classes
in language. She lives with her family that includes her mother, father, an elder brother named
Brian as well as a sister named Ellen who is younger than she is. Danielle has been receiving
special classes for improving her speech and language. She has been receiving these services
since the time she was in kindergarten. She had joined Head Start before going to kindergarten.
She likes her school and has high regards for her teacher. Mathematics is her favorite subject and
reading is least interesting to her. Danielle’s teacher had good feedback for her. According to
her, she is wise in managing time, is a hard worker, listens to all the instructions in the class and
is friendly with everyone in class. Her teacher also reported that she finds it difficult to
understand the concepts that are taught in the class, to remember sight words, to recall and blend
sounds for forming words, fluency in reading and has a low-test performance in reading class.
Danielle’s mother reported that she has always struggled with reading. She could not
learn the alphabets and had problems in rhyming words when she was in preschool. She had
scored in the category of high risk on Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) when she was in
kindergarten. However, she had managed to achieve her target by May. Danielle was at a high
risk on the Initial Sound Fluency (ISF) by fall benchmark however, she had aced it by year-end.
She also scored in the high-risk range in Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF) nonetheless; she
finished with a score of 43. While she struggled in reading the meaningless words throughout her
time in kindergarten, she was able to meet her benchmark with the score of 27 as well as with an
accuracy of 83% on Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF).

2IEP GOALS
Danielle had been administered the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing
(CTOPP). She scored average in the categories of phonological awareness and rapid naming.
Danielle scored below average in the categories of alternate phonological awareness and
phonological memory. Danielle was also observed in her classroom during reading. She was
unable to follow when others were reading the text aloud and she could not pronounce the words
correctly while reading. She could not name the high frequency words that were on flashcards.
Danielle made mistakes while reading from a book of her grade when she was working with a
small group. Her mother is apprehensive about her academic performance. Danielle has to be
given more attention in her reading and writing skills.
3 IEP Goals
The 3 IEP Goals are discussed below:
 Decoding: The academic standard is to know as well as apply grade level phonics and
decode words using skills of word analysis. The IEP goal would be to give the student a
list of 40 words of multi-syllables that would contain open, closed, vowel, consonants
and then the student would decode 40 words correctly. This goal aims on the student’s
capability to decode longer words (Lee, 2014).
 Fluency: The student needs to read with accuracy and fluency in order to understand.
The student should be able to read prose, poetry, with proper accuracy and expression.
The goal would be that the student would read 90 words per minute with an accuracy of
90% that would be measured on three consecutive occasions by the teacher’s records.
This goal’s purpose is to make the child read accurately and quickly by year-end.
 Vocabulary: The academic standard should be to determine the meaning of many
unknown words and phrases at the grade-level. The goal should be that the student is able

3IEP GOALS
to use strategies like using the dictionary to look for the meanings of the words with an
accuracy of 80%. This IEP goal aims at using the strategies to understand the meaning of
the words in the sentences. The student should be able to do it accurately in four out of
five times (More & Hart Barnett, 2014).
Intervention strategies
Many strategies are used in order to improve the reading abilities of the students who struggle
with it. Three such intervention strategies are discussed below:
 PALS – The strategy called Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) is a process where
the strong readers and the weak readers are paired together and then the students take
turns in reading the text, rereading as well a retelling. This improves the reading fluency
of the weak readers and helps them in increasing their accuracy.
 Teacher read aloud – This method is considered as one of the most useful methods that
improves the fluency as well as the comprehension of the student. The teachers are the
perfect models of a skilled reader as they are expert in reading and their skills can be used
to enhance the reading skills in the students. Using an audiobook would also give similar
results.
 FORI – The students use Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI) to read the same
text over many times during a week. The teacher reads loudly and the students follow.
The students can then echo-read, read it together and then read along with a partner. The
students take the text home if it seems that there is more requirement of practice and then
more number of activities are integrated in the week (Fisher & Frey, 2014).

4IEP GOALS
Intervention rationale
PALS is an effective intervention strategy for improving the reading abilities of the
students because it is an activity that enables the student to participate in different activities and
the teachers are able to observe, guide and supervise the students whenever needed (Connor et
al., 2014). Students are able to rate on the effectiveness of each other as a coach when proper
peer reviewing techniques are provide to them. The teachers are able to determine the motivation
of the students through such techniques. Researches have proved that PALS improves the
reading skills of the English learners with disabilities. FORI another intervention strategy has
been reported to be highly successful in the students with reading disabilities (Kuhn, Rasinski &
Zimmerman, 2014). The students were reported to have improved drastically in their reading
skills with FORI technique.

5IEP GOALS
References
Connor, C. M., Alberto, P. A., Compton, D. L., & O'Connor, R. E. (2014). Improving Reading
Outcomes for Students with or at Risk for Reading Disabilities: A Synthesis of the
Contributions from the Institute of Education Sciences Research Centers. NCSER 2014-
3000. National Center for Special Education Research.
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2014). Close reading as an intervention for struggling middle school
readers. Journal of adolescent & Adult literacy, 57(5), 367-376.
Kuhn, M., Rasinski, T., & Zimmerman, B. (2014). Integrated Fluency Instruction: Three
Approaches for Working with Struggling Readers. International Electronic Journal of
Elementary Education, 7(1), 71-82.
Lee, Y. (2014). Promise for enhancing children's reading attitudes through peer reading: A
Mixed method approach. The Journal of Educational Research, 107(6), 482-492.
More, C. M., & Hart Barnett, J. E. (2014). Developing individualized IEP goals in the age of
technology: Quality challenges and solutions. Preventing School Failure: Alternative
Education for Children and Youth, 58(2), 103-109.