How to Take a Simple Reading Assessment
Perhaps you have volunteered to teach English to immigrants in your community or tutor a teenager in reading. You may be concerned about your child’s reading ability and want to determine whether you need to seek professional help for him. In all of these cases, you need a simple way to take a reading assessment.
Reading assessments are the first thing to do before you begin teaching or seeking additional help. Don’t make assumptions about someone’s ability. To find out. The answer gives you the starting point for your instruction. Successful reading instruction depends on building previously learned skills. If you skip the essential steps of the chain, students will have a hard time jumping from where they are to where you are trying to start them.
Reading levels. Determining your student’s reading level will guide you in the selection of instructional materials if you are working as an English tutor. It will also help you work with your school district to help your child more.
There are three levels of reading:
Independent: The student can read with ease, precision and confidence. The student must be able to correctly pronounce all the words at this level.
Instructive: The student makes some mistakes but can still read most of the material.
Frustration: The student struggles, makes frequent mistakes, and shows symptoms of nervousness or dislike of homework.
Use instructional-level materials during tutoring sessions and assign independent-level reading material for homework. For homework assignments, use vocabulary and spelling worksheets that reinforce new vocabulary introduced in instructional-level reading. This approach builds confidence, reinforces the lesson, and adequately prepares the student for the next session.
Read aloud test. The easiest way to assess your reading level is to take a simple read-aloud test. You can use a reading test available online such as the Reading Proficiency Test sponsored by the National Right to Read Foundation. The test comes with instructions for administering it, scoring it, and interpreting the results.
Alternatively, you can present your student with six or seven paragraphs of 25 to 50 words. Each paragraph must be of a different grade level. You can determine the grade level by entering the paragraph into a word processor such as Microsoft’s “WORD” and running the spell check tool. At the end of the spell check, a summary appears. At the bottom of the summary is the Fleisch-Kincaid grade level score. This score is equivalent to the grade level of writing. So if the score is 1.5, it means that a first grader should be able to read that material. Have your student read the material aloud. The level at which the student makes more than one mistake for every twenty words will be the instructional level.
Phonetics survey. Reading is a process of decoding written symbols that represent sounds. Reading is a complete mystery if the student does not understand which symbols represent which sounds. This decoding system is not something that people absorb, it must be taught to them. You can quickly assess a student’s understanding of phonetics by doing the following:
Print each set of nonsense words below on a separate card.
Card 1.
TIF NEL ROM (easy consonants)
DUP CAV SEB (Short vowels)
Card 2.
KO HOAB WAJE (hard consonants)
ZEEX QUIDE YAIG (Long vowels)
Card 3.
WHAW THOIM PHER (Consonant digraphs)
OUSH CHAU EANG (Difficult vowels)
You will have three cards, each with six words. Explain to the student that you are going to show him a card with made-up words and that you want him to say them. Observe if the student pronounced all the words perfectly, if he knew some or did not know any. Any score less than perfect indicates that more phonics instruction is needed. A score of “Knew Something” indicates the starting point for instruction. Although I have noted the phonics level in parentheses next to each line, the card the student reads on should only include nonsense words.
Reading comprehension tests. Reading comprehension is the end goal of reading. If you can pronounce all the words in the correct order, but don’t know what they collectively mean, you won’t be able to read. There are reading comprehension tests and worksheets available online (search for “reading comprehension test printables”). If you wish, you can make them yourself by providing short reading passages at the appropriate reading levels. Next, ask questions that explore the following aspects of the passage:
Details in the passage.
Timeline questions. (What happened first? What happened next? When did this happen?)
True and false questions.
What is the main idea of the passage?
Once you know the area of understanding that a reader has not mastered, you can make that area the main focus during the tutorial session.
If you are concerned about your child’s reading progress and simple assessments point to a possible problem, begin to resolve the problem by first talking to your child’s teacher. Teachers know that there are many obstacles when a student is learning to read. A student may need glasses or have dyslexia. They may not have been taught phonetics or they may have missed critical lessons due to absences from school, etc. Today, most schools have reading specialists on staff to help uncover the reasons why a student is falling behind. It is important to stand up for your child as soon as you suspect a problem. Students can fall behind quickly and reading skills affect all subjects. Get help right away.
There you have it, simple information on how to assess someone’s reading ability. Of course, it doesn’t make you an expert reading teacher, but it gives you a place to start and can help you discern if your student needs more professional assistance.