This document discusses diagnostic reading assessments. It explains that reading is a fundamental skill and assessments are needed to determine if instruction is effective, identify students who need intervention, and inform how to intervene. Assessments evaluate oral reading skills like rate and errors, reading comprehension in literal, inferential and critical thinking, word attack through phonics and context clues, word recognition, and other related skills. Several specific assessments are described, including the GRADE which provides growth scores, DIBELS which screens phonemic awareness and reading skills, and TOPA-2+ which measures early reading skills.

1. Chapter 12
Using Diagnostic Reading Measures

2. Why Do We Assess Reading?
• It is a fundamental skill students need to be
successful in a variety of areas
• Need to know when instruction is working
• Need to know when intervention is needed
for certain students
• Need to know how to intervene
• A small group of students may need ongoing
accommodation (e.g., screen-reading
software)

3. History of Reading Instruction
• Up until 1950s: Whole Word Instruction
• After 1950: Increasing Evidence of the
Importance of Phonics Instruction
• Beginning in the 1970s: Recognition of the
importance of teaching phonemic awareness
as an early literacy skill
• However, many still disregard research
supporting phonics and phonemic awareness
instruction

4. Skills Assessed by Diagnostic Reading
Tests
• Oral Reading
• Reading Comprehension
• Word-Attack
• Word Recognition
• Other Reading and Reading-Related Behaviors

5. Oral Reading
• Rate of Reading
• Reading Errors
– Teacher pronunciation/aid
– Hesitation
– Gross mispronunciation
– Partial mispronunciation
– Omission
– Insertion
– Substitution
– Repetition
– Inversion

6. Reading Comprehension
• Literal Comprehension
• Inferential Comprehension
• Critical Comprehension
• Affective Comprehension
• Lexical Comprehension

7. Word-Attack
• Used to derive the pronunciation or meaning
of a word through phonic analysis, structural
analysis, or context cues

8. Word-Recognition
• Ascertain a student’s sight vocabulary
• Typically, with enough exposure, students will
recognize a given word.

9. Other Reading-Related Skills
• Vocabulary
• Handwriting
• Spelling
• Auditory Discrimination

10. GRADE
• Standardized, can be group administered
• Provides a growth score
• Large norm sample, but not all characteristics
are provided
• Total test score reliability is strong, subtests
not as strong

11. DIBELS Next
• Measures the following: phonemic awareness,
alphabetic principle, advanced phonics, fluent
reading, reading comprehension, and
vocabulary
• May be helpful as a screening tool; need
multiple administrations for other purposes

12. TOPA-2+
• Measures early phonemic awareness and
letter-sound correspondence for early
elementary school students
• Well-described norms
• Reliability better for kindergarteners than
more advanced students
• Adequate evidence for validity