Tests for reading?

Woodcock-Johnson has, I believe, a Reading Mastery (it’s what I used umpteen years ago so the name & version have changed) that has a form A and form B, so we used it at the end of every year and the student didn’t see the same test for anotehr 2 years (at which point s/he was usually in a totally different part of the test becuase reading skills had changed).

The Gray Oral Reading Test is another one that can give a lot of diagnostic information if you keep track of the mistakes. (If a kiddo reads fast that can be tough — you want a shorthand in place!) It also has A & B. I have found that the comprehension percentiles aren’t that reliable, though; I’ve had students bounce all over the map from year to year, while with the W-J they tend to progress more evenly, and it looks more like the kiddo I’m teaching.

It does help an awful lot to have some experience & training with figuring out how to interpret the things, of course.

Rocco,

Sue, the Webmastress who answered your inquiry, is knowledgeable and sincere.

I have used both forms of the Woodcock Test. It is not a test that was designed to be administered by parents. Reading specialists enroll in coursework before they use the tests, and their work is critiqued.

Results from the Woodcock and the Gray Oral will give you some insights as to where your son is functioning. Neither test will provide you with step-by-step lesson plans to improving reading ability.

A well-known author has told us that there is “no such thing as reading levels—when a kid can read, he can read anything.” I do not agree.

Reading tutors frequently make statements such as: “I worked with a child for only four months, and he made a two year gain in reading.” Yet, when I ask for the objective test they used to measure that improvement, they provide nothing. It seems reasonable that reliable, objective reading tests exist that measure reading ability, grade levels, and point the way to any necessary remediation. If they exist, where are they?

Can your son name every lowercase and uppercase letter at sight? Can he match likely sounds to letters when he looks at words in print? Can he say the 1,021 most common English words in print at soon as he sees them?

I use the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, the Gray Oral Reading Test, the Test of Word Reading Efficiency, and the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing. I use some other informal tests to check things like code knowledge.

Here’s a nice site with good reading testing information:

http://www.texasreadinginstitute.org/test_descript.htm

Janis

Thanks for the test site.

My concern is the perception that there are commercial reading tests that will pinpoint skills deficiencies for parents of LD students and provide detailed remedies. Tests can provide useful information, but I have not seen tests that will empower parents with precise remedial strategies.

Consider what is meant by a “third grade reading level.” Is it not a rather imprecise term? Different reading tests given to the same student on the same date often report divergent grade level scores.

>My concern is the perception that there are commercial reading tests that will pinpoint skills deficiencies for parents of LD students and provide detailed remedies. Tests can provide useful information, but I have not seen tests that will empower parents with precise remedial strategies.

Welp (as Sue would say :-)), I don’t know of a test that claims to do this, but the ones most diagnosticians, tutors, etc use don’t. The ones Janis mentioned certainly don’t.

There are tests like Dibels that identify where a young child is at certain key skills (letter ID, decoding, etc) so you can remediate early. I think that’s a good thing (though without the remediation it’s useless).

I’m sure there are such tests, just don’t know of them.

>Consider what is meant by a “third grade reading level.” Is it not a rather imprecise term? Different reading tests given to the same student on the same date often report divergent grade level scores.

Well it is a bit vague but it can still be useful info, esp as a kid gets older. You would worry about a 5th grader reading at a 3rd grade level, regardless of how specifically accurate the test is or that he might have a 2nd grade level on another test and a 4th on a different one.

—des

Thanks, DES. Your post prompted a Google search.

This might be what Rocco was looking for:

Dibers site: http://www.dynamicmeasurement.org/

Lets Go Learn Site: http://www.letsgolearn.com/index.html?adsource=google-reading_test-speed

This is the DIBELS site:

http://dibels.uoregon.edu/

Janis

It’s definitely worth mentioning that the tests provide limited information unless you know how to interpret them — since it woudl be easy for a parent not to be aware of this.
There are reading tests that don’t even provide that much information. The real “quick and dirty” ones like the WRAT (Wide Range Achievement Test) are best limited to screening (as we were taught in our course on assessment) since they are normed, so you find out how a person performs compared to a reasonably large sample of people the same age or grade, but what a high or low performance means is not broached. The WRAT and the Slosson are both lists of words that go from easy to hard — but they get there *quickly* so you have just a few words to look at to try to discern error patterns; even the WRAT words are lousy for that task since many of them are utterly irregular so you can’t tell whether a kiddo has any word attack skills or not.
On the other hand, the W-J has more words and it has assorted subtests which measure skill levels at different kinds of reading skills. For instance, a very common pattern is a “passage comprehension” grade level or percentile a big chunk higher than singe “word identification,” and even better than the nonsense word reading subtest. THat’s a red flag for a student who recognizes words in context but does not have strategies for sounding them out in isolation. If a student can’t sound out words as well as his/her peers, but is “on grade level” or at an acceptable percentile with reading in context, it says that there is a gap which is not normal (if it were, those percentiles would be about the same).

Sue wrote above: “The WRAT and the Slosson are both lists of words that go from easy to hard — but they get there *quickly* so you have just a few words to look at to try to discern error patterns; even the WRAT words are lousy for that task since many of them are utterly irregular so you can’t tell whether a kiddo has any word attack skills or not.”

I concur.

Regular visitors to this site will recall that Sue has dealt with the Great Debat topic (phonics vs. whole word instruction) many times. First time readers might have questions.

Yes, Sue, “utterly irregular” words exist, and many of them are high frequency words. Irregular words do not “discern error patterns” so they have limitations for remedial lessons. Yet, those words will have to be learned at some point. They appear in text and on tests. Word attack skills might not be the best way to help beginners to decode irregular words. What method(s) succeed in enabling most LD students to master irregular words?

See Previous replies to the last four or five times you’ve asked the same questions :-)

Sue,

You posted a courteous answer to an annoying, repetitive question I should not have asked. Please accept my apology. It will not happen again.

I have a procedure.

I continue to rely on presenting beginners with irregular words and correcting errors until the students have committed those words to memory (hopefully). The words are practiced in isolation and in text. The lessons are not especially exciting, and some of the students consider the task drudgery. Some parts of most irregular words lend themselves to phonetic technique. This can assist in decoding. Some students master irregular words faster than others who have higher IQs.

Arthur