Informal Reading Inventories

I don’t know of any that are available on line for free. But, you can purchase a used or new copy of the qualitative reading inventory 3 on Amazon for less than $30.00. . You can also check out the Burns and Roe reading inventory and see if that is available used as well.

The Analytical Reading Inventory (also available at amazon) is also good.

Here’s a free one that looks great!

http://dibels.uoregon.edu/

Janis

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I am interested in constructing an informal reading inventory for high school students. I primarily work with biology students and plan to teach reading within the content field of biology but want to make up an informal reading inventory. Can you email a copy to me or give me some direction? Thanks

You are going to have to make up your own especially if you want the students to COMPREHEND the vernacular. A run of the mill Reading Inventory will not tell you about the background knowledge the student has to comprehend difficult biology text. One issue is decoding the big words the other issue is do they have the words they are reading in their vocabulary. You may have to use the text itself and count how many miscues the child has when reading and then also check for vocabulary knowledge..

For example…I can decode this word pusillanimous..no problem…do I know what it means??? When I first decoded it in a graduate level class for teaching reading…I had no idea of its meaning. The professor that was teaching this class was kind of miffed because I got the word right off the bat and ruined some of his routine…he then told me, “You may never want to volunteer to read a word in this class again… as he proceeded to grill me about my strategies to decode the word. I told him how I did it and he headed me off at every turn and he succeeded in rattling me… This word is used in the Wizard of Oz..it means…timid or cowardly…I definitely wasn’t timid or cowardly after I went through that grilling :-).

I am printing this now as I type. Thank you. I can use these materials to add to my collection.

As I view it these are the strengths:

Good “prereading” assessments for K and good stuff for phonological stuff in first.

Weaknesses:

Up to only 3rd grade
No comprehension questions (I may write my own, though)
No word recognition lists, you need this to assess WORD reading, the single most difficult thing for a dyslexic, so you need to assess words in isolation on lists of graded difficulty.

Were you referring to the DIBELS, Anitya? My feeling for the reason that they are emphasizing K-2 is that identification and remediation needs to be done early rather than later. There are so many reading tests for later grades. I think they just wanted to create an inexpensive screening tool to identify younger kids who might need further testing. I certainly agree that comprehension and sight words must be assessed, but this instrument could be used first to screen for who needs further testing. I do think the nonsense words are useful to a dyslexic as well…that way you are sure they have not learned the word by sight when assessing the decoding skills. I haven’t tried using it yet, though. I have used the Phono-Graphix screening tests and I think they are great for the decoding aspect.

We were actually looking at screening tools for my daughter’s charter school for K and 1 to intervene earlier in remediationg reading problems. That’s how I found DIBELS. I need to print it out, too. Thanks for your comments.

Janis

Exactly, this is not an informal reading inventory (the original post asked for this and I was pointing out the differences), it is intended to be a fluency assessment program for primary grades. It is exactly what it appears to be and for this purpose it is appropriate.