A New Spin on Miscue Analysis: Using Spider Charts to Web Reading Processes

Abstract

This article introduces a way of seeing miscue analysis data through a spider chart, a readily available digital graphing tool that provides an effective way to visually represent readers’ complex coordination of interrelated cueing systems. A spider chart is a standard feature in recent spreadsheet software that puts a new spin on miscue analysis by quickly generating visual displays of children’s documented reading processes. Also known as radar charts, spider charts show webs that point to the apparent strategies that readers are using, providing a way to quickly visualize how well readers are noticing and coordinating syntactic, semantic, and graphophonic cues during the process of constructing meaning for a text. Following a brief overview of miscue analysis procedures, a range of spider charts is presented, using charts generated from reading analyses conducted by pre-service teachers in the author’s early literacy methods course.