Reading Assessment Techniques

We have created this summary of the different types of assessment that can be used for measuring development in reading skills in the hopes that teachers will better understand how single skills can be assessed by multiple measures. This description of the various assessment techniques may also help teachers to design their own classroom assessments, and may help teachers to better understand the district or campus assessments that are already being used with their students.

Each of the elements of the framework is briefly described, and descriptions of various forms of assessments that could be used for that framework element are provided.

Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension assessments are the most common type of published reading test that is available. The most common reading comprehension assessment involves asking a child to read a passage of text that is leveled appropriately for the child, and then asking some explicit, detailed questions about the content of the text (often these are called IRIs). There are some variations on reading comprehension assessments, however. For example, instead of explicit questions about facts directly presented in the text, the child could be asked to answer inferential questions about information which was implied by the text, or the child’s comprehension might be tested by his or her ability to retell the story in the child’s own words or to summarize the main idea or the moral of the story. Another common reading comprehension assessment is called a "cloze" task — words are omitted from the passage, and the child is asked to fill in the blanks with appropriate words. Also, young children’s reading comprehension can be assessed by asking them to read and follow simple instructions, such as, "Stand up" or, "Go look out the window."

Reading comprehension should not be confused with reading accuracy, another very common form of reading assessment. In a reading accuracy assessment, a child is asked to read a passage of text clearly, without making any mistakes. The mistakes that the child does make are analyzed to find clues about the child’s decoding strategies (not comprehension strategies). Very often, an assessment combines these two different assessments into one assessment — the child reads a passage out loud while the teacher makes note of errors the child makes (sometimes called a "running record"), and then the child is asked some comprehension questions about the passage. However, it is worth noting that a beginning reader’s comprehension usually suffers when he or she is asked to read a passage of text out loud. When children read orally, they usually concentrate on reading accurately, and do not pay as much attention to comprehension of the content. Oral reading accuracy does give insights into decoding skills and strategies, but that is a separate test. A reading comprehension test is most accurate if the child is not reading for an audience.

Language Comprehension

Because comprehension is what is being measured, language comprehension can be assessed in basically the same way reading comprehension is assessed. With language comprehension assessment, however, the child should not be expected to read any text. Everything from the instructions to the comprehension questions should be presented verbally to the child.

It is also worth noting that a child’s listening comprehension "level" is usually considerably higher than her reading comprehension "level." A child that is not able to read and understand a passage of text usually has no difficulty understanding the text if somebody else reads it to her. For most young children learning to read, their ability to read and understand text is limited by their decoding skills, not by their comprehension skills (That is not to say that most children have "good" comprehension skills or that comprehension skills are not a reading teacher’s concern. The point here is that even when a child’s comprehension skills are poor, their decoding skills are usually worse.). However, sometimes teachers find that a child who can not read and understand a passage of text also does not understand it when the teacher reads it to the child. It is always worthwhile to compare a child’s language comprehension with her reading comprehension to be sure that her ability to understand text is not being limited by her ability to understand language.

Decoding

 

As mentioned earlier, oral reading accuracy is one form of decoding assessment, but it is not a very "clean" assessment. Teachers need to be aware that, in their early attempts to acquire reading skills, children apply many different strategies, some of which are hard to detect. Children often attempt to guess words based on the context or on clues provided by pictures — most of the time, a child’s guesses are inaccurate, and their difficulties with decoding are revealed, but sometimes the child guesses correctly, making the teacher believe that the child accurately decoded the word. Teachers who use oral reading as a decoding assessment need to pay careful attention to the child as they read, and need to be aware that the child may know some words because those words are in the child’s sight-vocabulary, and the child may know other words because she is guessing.

Typically, decoding skill is measured through the child’s ability to read words out of context. Isolated words are presented to the child one at a time, and the child is asked to say the word aloud (this is not a vocabulary test, so children should not be expected to provide meanings for the word). The words selected for a decoding test should be words that are within the child’s spoken vocabulary, and should contain a mix of phonetically regular and phonetically irregular words.

A child can be tested on their accuracy (Is each word pronounced correctly?), their fluency (How much does the child struggle with word naming?), or their "level" — Leveled lists of words are provided by many publishers, and the child can be assessed as to her ability to decode words that are of varying difficulties.

Sometimes teachers test children’s ability to "recognize" sight words as a test of decoding skill, but "recognizing" words is not the same as decoding them. Decoding is a strategy that readers can use on all words, even words they’ve never seen before. Sight-word reading has to do with memorizing the "image" of a word or a specific feature of a word, and with this strategy, only a select few words are learned. All children go through a stage as they learn to read where they memorize a few sight words, and sometimes they are even encouraged by teachers who use Dolch word lists and frequency indexes to focus the child’s attention on the most useful sight words. However, memorizing sight words does not help a child to learn how to decode words, and testing the child’s knowledge of specific, well-practiced sight words does not provide a measure of her decoding skill.