How to do a simple reading assessment

Perhaps you have volunteered to teach English to immigrants in your community or as a reading tutor for a teenager. Perhaps you are concerned about your child’s reading ability and want to determine if 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 you should do before you start teaching or seeking additional help. Don’t make assumptions about someone’s ability. Discover. The answer gives you the starting point for your instruction. Successful teaching of reading depends on developing previously learned skills. If you skip essential steps in 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 teaching materials if you are working as an English tutor. It will also help you work with your school district to further help your child.

There are three reading levels:

Independent: The student can read with ease, accuracy, and confidence. The student must be able to correctly pronounce all the words at this level.
Instructions: The student makes some mistakes but can still read most of the material.
Frustration: The student has difficulty, makes frequent mistakes, and shows signs of nervousness or dislike of homework.

Use instructional level materials during tutoring sessions and assign independent level reading material for homework. For homework, 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.

Reading aloud test. The easiest way to assess 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 25-50 word paragraphs. Each paragraph must be a different grade level. You can determine the grade level by entering the paragraph into a word processor such as Microsoft “WORD” and running the spell check tool. When the spell checker is finished, a summary appears. At the bottom of the summary is the Fleisch-Kincaid grade level score. This score is equivalent to the school 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 error 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, they must be taught. You can quickly assess a student’s understanding of phonics by doing the following:

Write 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 (consonantal 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 them a card with made-up words and you want them to sound them out. Note whether the student pronounced all the words perfectly, knew some, or did not know any. Anything less than a perfect score indicates that more phonics instruction is needed. A “Knew Somewhat” score indicates the starting point for instruction. Although I have noted the phonics level in parentheses next to each line, the card the student reads should only include the nonsense words.

Reading comprehension tests. Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. If you can pronounce all the words in the correct order, but don’t know what they mean collectively, you can’t read. There are reading comprehension tests and worksheets available online (search for “reading comprehension test printables”). If you want, you can make them yourself by providing short reading passages at 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 ​​comprehension that a reader is not proficient in, you can make that area the main focus during the tutoring session.

If you are concerned about your child’s progress in reading and the simple assessments point to a possible problem, begin to solve the problem by first talking with 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 phonics, or they may have missed critical lessons due to absences from school, etc. Most schools today have reading specialists on staff to help uncover reasons a student is falling behind. It is important to advocate for your child as soon as she suspects there is a problem. Students can fall behind quickly, and reading skills affect all subjects. Get help right away.

So 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 does give you a starting point and can help you figure out if your student needs more professional help.