Reading Assessment
There are several types of reading assessments that are used to measure the amount and extent of development in a child’s reading skills with the hopes that teachers will be able to understand how a single skill can be assessed via numerous measures. There are various reading assessment techniques that also help teachers design their own personal classroom assessments and they also help teachers understand the campus or district assessments that are already in use by the students.
Reading Assessment Techniques
Here are a few of the reading assessment techniques that are described in brief:
- Reading comprehension – These are the most common forms of published reading tests available. Commonly, a reading comprehension test comprises of the child being made to read a small text passage, and then the child is asked a few detailed questions related to the text. However, there are certain variations to this kind of reading assessment. For instance, instead of being asked detailed questions, the child can be asked to answer certain inferential questions which have to be read –in-between-the-lines in the text passage. Another common reading comprehension assessment is the ‘cloze’ task, wherein words are purposefully omitted from the passage and the child will be asked to fill in the blanks with the appropriate words.
- Language Comprehension – Language comprehension can be measured in the same way that you would assess reading comprehension. However, with language comprehension, the child will not be asked to read any text. From the instructions to the questions, everything will be verbally presented to the child. It is wise to compare a child’s reading comprehension with his language comprehension to make sure that he understands the text both ways.
- Decoding – Oral reading is another form of decoding assessment, but it isn’t a very ‘clean’ assessment. Most of the time, children tend to guess words that are based on the text or clues that are provided by pictures. This way, the difficulties within the child’s guesses are plainly visible and their difficulties in decoding are revealed. However, sometimes the child guesses correctly and so the teacher will believe that the child decoded the word. Decoding is typically done by measuring the child’s ability to read words out of the context.
Other Reading Assessment Techniques
- Linguistic Knowledge
- Semantics
- Cipher Knowledge
- Phoneme Awareness
- Letter Knowledge
- Background Knowledge
- Phonology
- Syntax
- Lexical Knowledge
- Knowledge of the Alphabetical Principle
- Concepts about Print