A study of the use of retrospective miscue analysis with selected first-grade readers

Retrospective Miscue Analysis has been shown to be valuable in the development of strategic, confident readers who, through the process of engagement in reflective metacognitive dialogues, have gained a fuller understanding of the reading process and their roles as readers. The purpose of this study was to explore what selected first-grade readers thought about the reading process as they participated in retrospective miscue analysis (RMA) sessions and whether any changes occurred in the reading proficiency of the selected readers after participation in the RMA sessions.;The participants in this study were three first-grade students enrolled in a public K--5 school situated in a small, Midwestern rural community. The data were collected over a three-month period during the fourth quarter of the school year and included the readers' responses to reading interviews, miscue analyses, and retrospective miscue analysis sessions.;Results indicated that all three of the readers began this study with a belief that reading was knowing how to pronounce words, that exact reproduction of text was the goal of reading, and that sounding words out was the principle strategy for problem-solving during reading. After participating in the RMA sessions these readers began to take a more analytical approach to their miscues, describing their miscues and attempts at problem-solving in terms of language cueing systems and making sense rather than as errors that must be corrected.;The first-grade readers, after participating in the RMA sessions, increased their use of the syntactic and semantic cueing systems as miscues per hundred words and repetitions per hundred words decreased. These results indicated that the three readers moved toward more proficient oral reading.