Many teachers use a Sight Word Survey as a quick screening tool when looking for reading problems. These tests require students to read lists of common words at each grade level until several words are missed on a single list. Typically, the words should be read aloud with no hesitation or miscues. Further testing would be indicated if the student cannot read the sight word list for his grade placement level. There are several of these screening instruments available, including the Dolch List, the Fry 1000 Instant Words List, and the San Diego Quick Assessment.
The Informal Reading Inventory is a multi-purpose tool to assess a student's overall reading skill level. An IRI typically requires the student to read graded passages and respond to comprehension questions. If a passage is read with 99 to 100 percent accuracy and at least 90 percent of the questions are answered correctly, then the student can be assumed to read well at that level. Word recognition scores between 96 and 98 percent or comprehension scores between 60 and 85 percent indicate that the student is able to read the material at that grade level with assistance and may need support. A student who misreads more than 5 percent of the words or who cannot answer at least 60 percent of the questions is having extreme difficulty with text at that level and should not be required to read it independently. Commercial Informal Inventories include the Ekwall Informal Reading Inventory and the Qualitative Reading Inventory. Teachers can also create their own using grade level trade books and questions of their own design.
Efficient readers have to decode many types of unfamiliar words, so phonics screening is an important part of a reading assessment. A good phonics screening instrument requires students to demonstrate understanding and application of the sounds of individual consonants, the many different vowel sounds, the sounds of digraphs and dipthongs, and syllabication skills. The El Paso Phonics Survey is one such criterion-referenced test. In addition, phonics assessment should include nonsense syllables that incorporate common phonetic patterns, such as /gat/ and /plime/. This will provide information about which skills are truly mastered and eliminate the possibility of confounding phonics testing with knowledge of memorized words.
Reading fluency, the ability to read smoothly and without hesitation or stumbling, is also a good indicator of overall reading skill. Provide the student with grade-level reading passages of at least five hundred words and time the student's oral reading. Calculate the correct words per minute score and compare it to standards for the grade level. For comparison's sake, by the end of the school year, students in grade one should be able to read between 30 and 90 words per minute. By the end of third grade, the score should be 80 to 140 words per minute and by the end of sixth grade, it should be between 110 and 160 words per minute. The top of the scale is at the end of eighth grade, when the reader's rate should be between 130 and 180 words per minute.