Assessment of early reading development is important for all stakeholders. It can identify children who need special instruction and provide useful information to parents as well as summative accounts of early achievement in schools. Researchers at the Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) investigated early reading…

Weaknesses are apparent in two very popular informal reading comprehension measures. The Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) tests comprehension through questions only, while the Reading Miscue Inventory (RMI) is too cumbersome for the average classroom instructor to administer. Since both measures offer instructors ways of collecting data, they may…

Two trends have emerged in recent years in the diagnosis of remedial readers, which--when applied with caution--may be of reasonable value to the clinician and the teacher. One of these trends has been the promotion of informal assessments, and an accompanying plethora of commercial informal reading inventories (IRIs). These instruments are…

Describes an informal test for determining a student's ability to use context clues in decoding unfamiliar words. (TO)

Three informal measures for determining whether students can read the assigned text material are described in this paper. The diagnostic measures are the informal textbook test, the cloze procedure, and the informal skills test. In the informal textbook test, a student is asked to read a 250 word passage selected from the textbook intended for…

Informal assessment, the use of teacher designed instruments that are based on materials actually used in the content area classroom, is used to determine the student's potential for success with particular materials and the areas of potential difficulty in these materials. Informal assessment also helps to determine the need for supportive…

The easiest way for a content area teacher to find how effectively students can read materials assigned in class is to design a teacher-made inventory, using the materials to be read and studied by the students, called a Textbook Usage Inventory. Reading skills and resources that should be incorporated in the inventory include literal skills,…

Errors in oral reading tests result from inaccuracies that tend to creep in because children are not totally consistent while taking a test and from inaccuracies caused when the examiner does not catch a word recognition error, giving credit for an answer that is more wrong than right or vice versa. Every test contains a standard error of…

A study was undertaken to create and validate a diagnostic, task-based Informal Reading Readiness Inventory (IRRI). IRRI subtests were created to reflect four areas found to be important in reading readiness: awareness of self and media, language experience, reasoning, and phonics. Prereading curriculum components formed the basis for test item…

THE INDIANA READING QUARTERLY AIMS TO PROVIDE A COMMUNICATION LINK WITH THE VARIOUS LOCAL COUNCILS SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE STATE. MOST OF THE ARTICLES SHOULD INTEREST INDIANA'S CLASSROOM TEACHERS, SINCE THE JOURNAL'S MAJOR FOCUS IS READING INSTRUCTION IN INDIANA. MOST OF THE ARTICLES WILL BE WRITTEN BY EDUCATORS IN INDIANA. VOLUME A OF THE…

Presented is a critical inquiry about the product of the informal reading inventory (IRI) and about some of the elements used in the process of determining that product. Recent developments on this topic are briefly reviewed. Questions are raised concerning what is a suitable criterion level for word recognition. The original criterion of 95…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between word recognition and comprehension achieved by second and fifth grade students when reading material at various levels of readability. A random sample of twenty-five second and twenty-five fifth graders, taken from three middle class schools, was administered a…

The purpose of this study was to obtain a measure of the reliability of the informal reading inventory (IRI) when administered to selected sixth grade students. Houghton Mifflin's Pupil Placement Tests were administered to 36 sixth grade girls. The raw scores of the students on the pupil Placement Tests were divided into two equivalent halves, and…

Evaluation in reading must be a continuous process. The assessment of readiness, progress, and mastery in the development of skills, concepts, and behaviors must be an ongoing process if the best decisions are to be made for each learner. The articles included in this yearbook offer a variety of assessment techniques, using both objective and…

Students enrolled in three school districts in Northern Illinois were investigated to determine the relationship between the self-esteem of selected groups of intermediate grade children and their attitude toward reading, in terms of their sex, grade level, classification of school, and various combinations of these factors. Data was collected by…