Reading assessment and progress monitoring
Reading assessment is how you find out what a student can do and what to teach next. Most schools use three kinds: a short screener for every student, a diagnostic check that pinpoints the skills a struggling student is missing, and progress monitoring that tracks whether teaching is working.
Each kind answers a different question. A screener asks who might need help. A diagnostic phonics check asks which patterns are not yet known. Progress monitoring asks whether the student is improving fast enough, usually with a one-minute measure given every week or two and graphed against a goal line.
The articles here explain each kind of assessment, how to give and score them, how to read the results without overreading them, and how to write measurable IEP reading goals from a baseline. They also cover nonsense word reading and why it is used.
The IEP goals pages hold sample goals for each reading skill, with a baseline and a measurable target.
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Reading assessment types: screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring and outcome
The four kinds of reading assessment explained: screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring and outcome tests, what each answers and when to give it.
All articles
Universal screening for reading: a teacher's guide
How universal reading screening works: what to measure by grade, when to screen, how to set cut points and what to do with students who score low.Phonics survey: how to give and score one
How to give a phonics survey to find decoding gaps: what to include, real vs made-up words, stop rules, scoring and turning results into groups.Informal decoding inventory: what it shows and how to use it
An informal decoding inventory checks single-syllable and multisyllable decoding. Learn what it covers, how to give it and how to read the results.Spelling inventory: how to give it and score it by feature
How to give a developmental spelling inventory, score it by feature instead of by word, and use the error patterns to plan phonics and spelling lessons.Progress monitoring graphs: how to set one up and read it
How to graph reading progress monitoring data: baseline, axes, goal line, phase lines and errors, with a step-by-step setup any teacher can follow.Aimlines and rate of improvement in reading progress monitoring
How to draw an aimline, calculate a student's rate of improvement in words per week, and set a reading goal that closes the gap instead of keeping pace.Decision rules for reading progress monitoring data
The four-point rule and trend-line rule explained: when progress data says change instruction, keep going or raise the goal, with the checks to run first.Nonsense word tests: pros, cons and how to use them fairly
Why reading tests use nonsense words, what made-up word scores tell you, their real limits, and how to use them without teaching to the test.Measurable reading IEP goals: how to write them from real data
How to write measurable reading IEP goals from progress monitoring data: the parts of a goal, setting the criterion, examples by skill and common mistakes.