250 Word Summary
Need to read article and summarize in 250 words the key points from the article and your reaction.
SPRING/SUMMER 1998
ONE OF the most compelling findings from recentreading research is that children who get off to a
poor start in reading rarely catch up. As several studies
have now documented, the poor first-grade reader al-
most invariably continues to be a poor reader (Francis,
Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996; Torge-
sen & Burgess, 1998). And the consequences of a slow
start in reading become monumental as they accumu-
late exponentially over time. As Stanovich (1986)
pointed out in his well-known paper on the “Matthew
effects” (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer)
associated with failure to acquire early word reading
skills, these consequences range from negative atti-
tudes toward reading (Oka & Paris, 1986), to reduced
opportunities for vocabulary growth (Nagy, Herman, &
Anderson, 1985), to missed opportunities for develop-
ment of reading comprehension strategies (Brown,
Palinscar, & Purcell, 1986), to less actual practice in
reading than other children receive (Arlington, 1984).
The best solution to the problem of reading failure
is to allocate resources for early identification and
prevention. It is a tragedy of the first order that while
we know clearly the costs of waiting too long, few
school districts have in place a mechanism to identify
and help children before failure takes hold. Indeed, in
the majority of cases, there is no systematic identifica-
tion until third grade, by which time successful remedi-
ation is more difficult and more costly.
School-based preventive efforts should be engi-
neered to maintain growth in critical word reading
skills at roughly normal levels throughout the early el-
ementary school period. Although adequate develop-
ment of these skills in first grade does not guarantee
that children will continue to maintain normal growth
in second grade without extra help, to the extent that
we allow children to fall seriously behind at any point
during early elementary school, we are moving to a “re-
medial” rather than a “preventive” model of interven-
tion. Once children fall behind in the growth of critical
word reading skills, it may require very intensive inter-
ventions to bring them back up to adequate levels of
reading accuracy (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1994;
Vaughn & Schumm, 1996), and reading fluency may be
even more difficult to restore because of the large
amounts of reading practice that is lost by children
each month and year that they remain poor readers
(Rashotte,Torgesen, & Wagner, 1997).
The purpose of this article is to provide practical ad-
vice about methods to prevent reading failure that is
grounded in the new knowledge about reading we
have acquired over the past two decades. My primary
focus will be on early identification of children at risk
for problems in learning to read as well as methods for
monitoring the growth of critical early reading skills.
The goal is to describe procedures that will allow edu-
cators to identify children who need extra help in
reading before they experience serious failure and to
monitor the early development of reading skill to iden-
tify children who may require extra help as reading
instruction proceeds through elementary school.
The advice provided in this article is based on the
research my collea gues Richard Wa gner, Carol
Rashotte, and I have been conducting on both predic-
tion and prevention of reading disabilities (Torgesen,
Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994; 1997; Wagner, et al., 1994;
1997) as well as the work of many other researchers
that was reviewed in an earlier issue of this magazine
(Summer, 1995). It is guided by several important as-
sumptions and facts about reading, reading growth,
and reading failure that will be discussed first. Follow-
ing this description of assumptions and a brief outline
of some critical dimensions of preventive instruction, I
will describe a number of specific measures and pro-
cedures that should prove useful as educators seek
1 AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
CATCH THEM
BEFORE THEY FALL
Identification and Assessment
To Prevent Reading Failure in Young Children
BY JOSEPH K.TORGESEN
Joseph K. Torgesen is currently a Distinguished Re-
search Professor of psychology and education at
Florida State University. For the last ten years, he has
been part of the research effort sponsored by the Na-
tional Institutes of Health to identify the nature,
causes, and best approaches to instruction for chil-
dren with moderate to severe reading problems. The
research conducted at Florida State University that
is cited in this article was supported by grants num-
bered HD23340 and HD30988 from the National In-
stitute of Child Health and Human Development,
and by grants from the National Center for Learning
Disabilities and the Donald D. Hammill Foundation.
SPRING/SUMMER 1998
ways to focus more intensive in-
struction on children whose needs
are greatest.
Assumptions about reading,
reading growth, and reading failure
Most of the points that will be discussed in this sec-
tion are not, in fact, mere assumptions about reading,
but, rather, are well-established facts. However, I use
the word assumption here to convey the sense either
that the ideas are self-evident or that they are now as-
sumed to be true based on consistent research find-
ings.The first of these “assumptions” is, in fact, a self-ev-
ident value judgment.
Adequate reading comprehension is the most im-
portant ultimate outcome of effective instruction in
reading. The ultimate purpose of reading instruction is
to help children acquire the skills that enable learning
from, understanding, and enjoyment of written lan-
guage.This “assumption” is not controversial. No matter
what one’s personal preferences for instructional
method, the end goal is to help children comprehend
written material at a level that is consistent with their
general intellectual abilities.
Two general types of skill and knowledge are re-
quired for good reading comprehension. Consistent
with Gough’s “simple view of reading” (1996), compre-
hension of written material requires: 1) general lan-
guage comprehension ability; and 2) ability to accu-
rately and fluently identify the words in print. Knowl-
edge and active application of specific reading strate-
gies is also required to maximize reading comprehen-
sion (Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1997) but most of the
variability among children and adults in comprehen-
sion of written material can be accounted for by mea-
suring the two broad families of skills identified in
Gough’s simple view (Hoover & Gough, 1990).That is,
good general language comprehension and good word
reading skills are the most critical skills required for ef-
fective comprehension of written material.
Most children who become poor readers experi-
ence early and continuing difficulties in learning
how to accurately identify printed words. This diffi-
culty is expressed most di-
rectly on two kinds of reading
tasks. First, children destined to be
poor reader s at the end of elementar y
school almost invariably have difficulties under-
standing and applying the alphabetic principle in deci-
phering unfamiliar words.These children have unusual
difficulties learning to use the regular patterns of cor-
respondence between letters and sounds in words as
an aid in identifying new words they encounter in text
(Siegel, 1989). They have trouble “sounding out” un-
known words. Second, poor readers at all grade levels
are characterized by slower than normal development
of a “sight vocabulary” of words they can read fluently
and automatically. Ultimately, it is this difficulty in rapid
word recognition that limits comprehension in older
poor readers, for these skills allow children to focus on
constructing the meaning of what they are reading
rather than spending too many of their intellectual re-
sources on trying to identify the words (Adams, 1990).
The strongest current theories of reading growth link
phonetic and “sight word” reading skills together by
showing how good phonetic reading skills are neces-
sary in the formation of accurate memory for the
spelling patterns that are the basis of sight word recog-
nition (Ehri, in press; Share & Stanovich, 1995).
The most common cause of difficulties acquiring
early word reading skills is weakness in the ability to
process the phonological features of language (Liber-
man, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989). This is perhaps
the most important discovery about reading difficulties
in the last twenty years. Weaknesses in the phonologi-
cal area of language development can be measured by a
variety of nonreading tasks, but the ones most com-
monly used assess phonemic awareness, which can be
defined simply as the ability to identify, think about, or
manipulate the individual sounds in words. Much of
our new confidence in being able to identify children
at risk for reading failure before reading instruction be-
gins depends on the use of tests of phonemic aware-
ness, since this ability has been shown to be causally re-
lated to the growth of early word reading skills (Lund-
berg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988;Wagner, et al., 1997).
Discovery of the core phonological problems associ-
AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 2
SPRING/SUMMER 1998
ated with specific reading disability has had at least
one unanticipated consequence. The ability to assess
these core language problems directly has led to the
discovery that the early word reading difficulties of
children with relatively low general intelligence and
verbal ability are associated with the same factors
(weaknesses in phonological processing) that interfere
with early reading growth in children who have gen-
eral intelligence in the normal range (Fletcher, et al.,
1994; Share & Stanovich, 1995; Stanovich & Siegel,
1994). So, weaknesses in phonemic awareness charac-
terize children with reading problems across a broad
span of general verbal ability. On the one hand, many
children enter school with adequate general verbal
ability and cognitive weaknesses limited to the phono-
logical/language domain. Their primary problem in
learning to read involves learning to translate between
printed and oral language. On the other hand, another
significant group of poor readers, composed largely of
children from families of lower socio-economic or mi-
nority status, enter school significantly delayed in a
much broader range of prereading skills (Whitehurst &
Lonigan, in press). Since these children are delayed not
only in phonological but also in general oral language
skills, they are deficient in both of the critical kinds of
knowledge and skill required for good reading compre-
hension. Even if these children can acquire adequate
word reading skill, their ability to comprehend the
meaning of what they read may be limited by their
weak general verbal abilities.
Children with general oral language weaknesses re-
quire extra instruction in a broader range of knowl-
edge and skills than those who come to school im-
paired only in phonological ability. What is well estab-
lished at this point, though, is that both kinds of chil-
dren will require special support in the growth of
early word reading skills if they are to make adequate
progress in learning to read.
Elements of an effective preventive
program in reading
The most critical elements of an effective program
for the prevention of reading disability at the elemen-
tary school level are: (a) the right kind and quality of
instruction delivered with the (b) right level of inten-
sity and duration to (c) the right children at the (d)
right time. I will briefly consider each of these ele-
ments in turn.
The right kind and quality of instruction. It is be-
yond the scope of this article to discuss instructional
methods for children with phonological processing
weaknesses in any depth at all. In broad stroke, they
will benefit from the same approach to reading in-
struction as children with normal abilities in this
area—structured, systematic, and explicit—but for this
at-risk group, such instruction is not just beneficial, it is
critical. As experienced teachers understand (Gaskins,
et al., 1996), we cannot assume that these children will
acquire any necessary skill for reading words unless
they are directly taught that skill or knowledge and re-
ceive sufficient opportunities to practice it. Some of
the word-level skills and knowledge these children will
require instruction on include: phonemic awareness,
letter-sound correspondences, blending skills, a small
number of pronunciation conventions (i.e., silent e
rule), use of context to help specify a word once it is
partially or completely phonemically decoded, strate-
gies for multi-syllable words, and automatic recogni-
tion of high-frequency “irregular” words. It goes almost
without saying that this type of instruction should be
embedded within as many opportunities for meaning-
ful reading and writing as possible.
The lesson from recent large-scale prevention stud-
ies (Brown & Felton, 1990; Foorman, et al., 1998;Torge-
sen, et al., 1998;Vellutino, et al., 1997) is that it is possi-
ble to maintain critical word reading skills of most chil-
dren at risk for reading failure at roughly average levels
if this type of instruction is provided beginning some-
time during kindergarten or first grade. However, it is
also true that in all studies conducted to date, substan-
tial proportions of children with the most severe
weaknesses remain significantly impaired in these criti-
cal skills following intervention. For example, if we
adopt the 30th percentile as a standard for adequate
reading progress, then the proportion of the total pop-
ulation remaining at risk in spite of the best interven-
tions tested to date ranges from 5 percent to 7 percent
(Torgesen, 1998).Although these results are clearly bet-
ter than the 30 percent to 60 percent of children who
frequently fall below these standards without special
interventions, they nevertheless suggest that there is a
core of disabled readers in the population for whom
we have not yet solved the reading puzzle.
It is almost certain that some additional answers to
this question will come as we direct our attention to
the quality and intensity, as well as the content, of our
instruction. For example, Juel (1996) has shown the
importance of a particular kind of “scaffolded” interac-
tion between teacher and child in increasing under-
standing and application of phonemic reading skills,
and these types of interactions are also prescribed in
the teacher manuals of at least two widely used in-
structional programs designed for children with read-
ing disabilities (Lindamood & Lindamood, 1984; Wil-
son, 1988). We turn now to a brief consideration of is-
sues surrounding intensity of instruction.
The right level of intensity. Greater intensity and du-
ration of instruction is required because the increased
explicitness of instruction for children who are at risk
for reading failure requires that more things be taught
directly by the teacher. Intensity of instruction is in-
creased primarily by reducing teacher/student ratios.
Unless beginning reading instruction for children with
phonological weaknesses is more intensive (or lasts
significantly longer) than normal instruction, these
children will necessarily lag significantly behind their
peers in reading growth. An effective preventive pro-
gram may involve several levels of instructional inten-
sity ranging from small-group to one-on-one instruc-
tion, depending upon the severity of the risk factors
for each child.
The right children at the right time. These factors
are considered together because they are both tied di-
rectly to the availability of accurate identification pro-
cedures at various age levels. That is, to be most effi-
3 AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
SPRING/SUMMER 1998
cient, a preventive program should be focused on the
children who are most in need of special instruction.
The efficiency of the entire process will be improved
if procedures are available to accurately target the
right children very early in the process of reading in-
struction. Although timing issues with regard to
preventive instruction have not been completely
resolved by research (Torgesen, et al., 1998), we
do know, for example, that instruction in
phonological awareness during kinder-
garten can have a positive effect on
reading growth after formal reading
instruction begins in the first grade
(Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988).
Thus, I have proceeded on the as-
sumption that it will be useful to
identify high-risk children at some
time during the kindergarten year
so that preventive work may begin
as early as possible.
How accurate are currently
available early identification
procedures?
As stated earlier, the primary purpose of this article is
to make some practical suggestions about procedures
and tests that can be used to identify children for pre-
ventive reading or prereading instruction. From the out-
set, however, it is important to recognize that our ability
to predict which children will have the most serious
reading difficulties is still far from perfect. For example,
in a recent comprehensive review of early identification
research (1998), Scarborough pointed out that all stud-
ies continue to report substantial levels of two kinds of
prediction errors.
False positive errors are made when children who
will eventually become good readers score below the
cut-off score on the predictive instrument and are
falsely identified as “at risk.” In general, the proportion
of this type of error has ranged between 20 percent
and 60 percent, with an average of around 45 percent.
That is, almost half of the children identified during
kindergarten as “at risk” turn out not to have serious
reading problems by the end of first grade. False nega-
tive errors occur when children who later exhibit
reading problems are identified as not being at risk.
Typical percentages of false negative errors range from
10 percent to 50 percent, with an average of around
22 percent. That is, on average, current procedures fail
to identify about 22 percent of children who eventu-
ally end up with serious reading difficulties.
In any given study, the relative proportion of false pos-
itive and false negative errors is somewhat arbitrary,
since it depends on the level of the cut-off score. For ex-
ample, we reported a significant reduction in the per-
centage of false negative errors within the same sample
of children by doubling the number of children we
identified as at risk (Torgesen, in press; Torgesen &
Burgess, 1998). Our goal was to identify, during the first
semester of kindergarten, the children most at risk to be
in the bottom 10 percent in word reading ability by the
beginning of second grade. When we selected the 10
percent of children who scored
lowest on our predictive tests, our
false negative rate was 42 percent
(we missed almost half the chil-
dren who became extremely
poor readers). However, when
we identified the 20 percent of
children who scored lowest on
our measures, the false nega-
tive rate was reduced to 8 per-
cent. As a practical matter, if
schools desire to maximize
their chances for early in-
tervention with the most im-
paired children, they should pro-
vide this intervention to as many children as possi-
ble.This is less of a waste of resources than it might
seem at first glance, because, although many of
the falsely identified children receiving interven-
tion may not be among the most seriously disabled
readers, most of them are likely to be below-average
readers (Torgesen & Burgess, 1998).
Two other pieces of information are relevant to the
selection of procedures for early identification of chil-
dren at risk for reading difficulties. First, prediction ac-
curacy increases significantly the longer a child has
been in school. Prediction of reading disabilities from
tests given at the beginning of first grade is signifi-
cantly more accurate than from tests administered dur-
ing the first semester of kindergarten (Scarborough,
1998; Torgesen, Burgess, & Rashotte, 1996). Given the
widely varying range of children’s preschool learning
opportunities, many children may score low on early
identification instruments in the first semester of
kindergarten simply because they have not had the op-
portunity to learn the skills. However, if prereading
skills are actively taught in kindergarten, some of these
differences may be reduced by the beginning of the
second semester of school. Thus, I would recommend
that the screening procedures described here not be
administered until the beginning of the second semes-
ter of kindergarten, at which time they will be much
more efficient in identifying children who will require
more intensive preventive instruction in phonemic
awareness and other early reading skills.
Second, although batteries containing multiple tests
generally provide better prediction than single instru-
ments, the increase in efficiency of multi-test batteries
is generally not large enough to warrant the extra time
and resources required to administer them (Scarbor-
ough, 1998). Thus, I recommend an identification pro-
cedure involving administration of two tests: 1) a test
of knowledge of letter names or sounds; and 2) a mea-
sure of phonemic awareness. Measures of letter knowl-
edge continue to be the best single predictor of read-
ing difficulties, and measures of phonemic awareness
contribute additional predictive accuracy. In our expe-
rience, tests of letter name knowledge are most predic-
tive for kindergarten children, and tests of letter-sound
knowledge are most predictive for first graders. Since
reading growth is influenced by noncognitive factors
such as attention/motivation and home background
(Torgesen, et al., 1998), as well as specific knowledge
AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 4
SPRING/SUMMER 1998
and skills, scores from these objective tests
might profitably be supplemented with
teacher ratings of behavior and attention
to identify children most at risk for sub-
sequent difficulties in learning to read.
How should phonemic
awareness be assessed?
Since researchers first began to
study phonological awareness in the
early 1970s, more than twenty different tasks
have been used to measure awareness of phonemes
in words. These measures can be grouped into three
broad categories: sound comparison, phoneme seg-
mentation, and phoneme blending.
■ Sound comparison tasks use a number of differ-
ent formats that all require children to make compar-
isons between the sounds in different words. For ex-
ample, a child might be asked to indicate which word
(of several) begins or ends with the same sound as a
target word (i.e., “Which word begins with the same
first sound as cat: boy, cake, or fan?”). Additionally,
tasks that require children to generate words that have
the same first or last sound as a target word would fall
in this category. Sound comparison tasks are among
the least difficult measures of phonemic awareness,
and thus are particularly appropriate for kindergarten
age children.
■ Phoneme segmentation tasks involve counting,
pronouncing, deleting, adding, or reversing the individ-
ual phonemes in words. Common examples of this
type of task require pronouncing the individual
phonemes in words (“Say the sounds in cat one at a
time.”), deleting sounds from words (“Say card without
saying the /d/ sound.”), or counting sounds (“Put one
marker on the line for each sound you hear in the
word fast.”)
■ Phoneme blending skill has only been measured
by one kind of task. This is the sound-blending task in
which the tester pronounces a series of phonemes in
isolation and asks the child to blend them together to
form a word (i.e., “What word do these sounds make,
/f/ – /a/ – /t/?”). Easier variants of the sound-blending
task can be produced by allowing the child to choose
from two or three pictures the word that is repre-
sented by a series of phonemes.
In general, these different kinds of phonemic aware-
ness tasks all appear to be measuring essentially the
same construct, or ability. Although some research
(Yopp, 1988) has indicated that the tasks may involve
different levels of intellectual complexity, and there
may be some differences between segmentation and
blending tasks at certain ages (Wagner, Torgesen, &
Rashotte, 1994), for the most part, they all seem to be
measuring growth in the same general ability (Hoien,
et al., 1995; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984).
Sound comparison measures are easiest and are sensi-
tive to emergent levels of phonological awareness,
while segmentation and blending measures are sensi-
tive to differences among children during later stages
of development involving refinements in explicit levels
of awareness. Measures of sensitivity to rhyme (“Which
word rhymes with cat: leg or mat?”) are not
included as measures of phonemic aware-
ness because they appear to be measuring
something a little different, and less pre-
dictive of reading disabilities, from those
measure that ask children to attend to
individual phonemes. For the same
reason, measures of syllable aware-
ness are not included in this group.
Measures of phonemic awareness
that are suited for early identification
purposes include the following three
widely used tests:
The Phonological Awareness Test (Robertson &
Salter, 1995). This test contains five different measures
of phonemic awareness, plus a measure of sensitivity
to rhyme. The five measures of phonemic awareness
are segmentation of phonemes, phoneme isolation,
phoneme deletion, phoneme substitution, and
phoneme blending. The phoneme isolation test, which
requires children to pronounce the first, last, or middle
sounds in words, would appear to have the most ap-
propriate level of difficulty for kindergarten screening
(the test should be easy enough so that only the most
delayed children will do poorly on it), and any of the
others could be used for first- or second-grade assess-
ments. The Phonological Awareness Test is nationally
normed on children from age five through nine, and it
can be ordered from LinguiSystems, 3100 4th Avenue,
East Moline, IL 61244-0747. Phone: 800-776-4332. The
cost of a test manual, test supplies, and fifteen test
booklets is $69.
The Test of Phonological Awareness (Torgesen &
Bryant, 1994).This test was designed as a group-admin-
istered test of phonemic awareness for kindergarten
and first-grade children. It was specifically constructed
to be most sensitive to children with weaknesses in de-
velopment in this area, which helps make it appropri-
ate for identifying at-risk children. The kindergarten
version of the test requires children to notice which
words (represented by pictures) begin with the same
first sound, while the first-grade version asks them to
compare words on the basis of their last sounds. It can
be easily administered to groups of five to ten children
at a time. The Test of Phonological Awareness is na-
tionally normed, and it can be ordered from PRO-ED
Publishing Company, 8700 Shoal Creek Blvd., Austin,
TX 78757-6897. Phone: (512) 451-3246. The cost of a
test manual and a supply of fifty test forms (twenty-five
kindergarten version, twenty-five elementary school
version) is $124.
The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation
(Yopp, 1995) is a brief test of children’s ability to iso-
late and pronounce the individual phonemes in words.
This is a task that has been widely used in research on
phoneme awareness over the past twenty years, and it
is highly correlated with other measures of phoneme
awareness. The test was designed for children in
kindergarten, but it should also be appropriate for
identifying children who are weak in phonemic aware-
ness during first grade. The test has twenty-two items
that are all of the same type and that ask the child to
pronounce each of the phonemes in words that vary
from two to three phonemes in length. The test does
5 AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
SPRING/SUMMER 1998
not have norms with it, but it is available free in vol-
ume 49 (1995) of the widely read journal The Reading
Teacher, pp. 20-29.
The measurement
of letter knowledge
In all of our research, we have measured letter
knowledge in two ways. We measure letter name
knowledge by presenting each letter in simple upper-
case type on a single card and asking for its name.The
score on this test is simply the number of letters for
which the child can give the appropriate name. We
measure letter-sound knowledge by presenting all let-
ters in lower-case type and asking for the “sound the
letter makes in words.” If a consonant letter can com-
monly represent two different sounds (i.e., c, g) we
probe for the second sound, and we also ask for the
long and short pronunciation of each vowel.The score
is the total number of sounds the child can give. We
have found that letter-name knowledge is a more sensi-
tive predictor for kindergarten children, while letter-
sound knowledge is a better predictor for children in
first grade. Two tests that provide nationally standard-
ized norms for performance on letter-name and letter-
sound knowledge are:
The letter identification subtest of the Woodcock
Reading Mastery Test-Revised (Woodcock, 1987). This
test does not measure simple letter-name knowledge
in the way we assess it, because it presents letters in
several different fonts, some of which may be unfamil-
iar to children. It also allows children to give either the
name or the sound the letter makes in words. How-
ever, children who perform poorly in kindergarten (do
not know the names of very many letters) will not
reach the more difficult items, so that their score
should be quite comparable to a more straightforward
test of letter-name knowledge. The Reading Mastery
Test-Revised is available from American Guidance Ser-
vice, 4201 Woodland Road, Circle Pines, MN 55014-
1796. Phone (800) 328-2560. The cost for the manual
and forms is $314.95.
The graphemes subtest of the Phonological Aware-
ness Test (Robertson & Salter, 1995). This test provides
a comprehensive assessment of letter-sound knowl-
edge extending from single consonants (i.e., b,c,k,m)
through vowel digraphs and diphthongs (i.e., ea, ai, ow,
oy).As mentioned before, it is standardized on children
from aged five through nine.
Is it necessary for a test to be
nationally standardized for it to be
useful in early identification?
This issue is important because of the potential ex-
pense of employing standardized measures in large-
scale screening efforts. Nationally based norms are not
required to identify which children within a given
classroom or school are weakest in phonemic aware-
ness and letter knowledge. However, the proportion of
children who come to school with weak skills and
knowledge in these areas will depend somewhat on
specific aspects of their preschool language and liter-
acy environment and will almost certainly vary from
school to school across different communities. Tests
with national norms can help to pinpoint classes or
schools in which a special effort must be made to en-
hance phonological awareness in children prior to, or
during, reading instruction. For example, a classroom
in which 75 percent of the children performed below
the 20th percentile (in the bottom 20 percent of all
children), will require more instructional resources to
prepare children for learning to read than a classroom
in which only 10 percent of the children scored that
low. Without norms, it is possible to identify weak chil-
dren within a given class or school, but it is not possi-
ble to determine what proportion of children in the
entire school may require intervention because of rela-
tively weak prereading skills and knowledge. On the
one hand, if classroom resources allow extra help for
only a fixed number of children (say, 20 percent to 30
percent), then measures without national norms can
be used to identify the group of children within the
classroom most in need of intervention. On the other
hand, if the goal is to determine the amount of re-
sources that may be needed to help all children with
relatively weak skills in these areas, then normative
measures will be required.
The combination of letter knowledge and phonemic
awareness tests I have recommended should take no
more than ten to fifteen minutes per child to adminis-
ter.The tests do not require highly trained personnel to
administer them, although anyone who tests young
children must be very familiar with the tests and be
able to establish a supportive rapport.
Monitoring growth
in early reading skills
Once reading instruction begins, the best predictor
of future reading growth is current reading achieve-
ment, and the most critical indicators of good progress
in learning to read during the early elementary period
are measures of word reading skill. Children who end
up as poor readers at the end of elementary school are
almost invariably those who fail to make normal
progress in these skills during the first years of elemen-
tary school. These children are most frequently im-
paired in both the ability to apply phonetic strategies
in reading new words and in the ability to retrieve
sight words from memory. They not only have diffi-
culty becoming accurate in the application of these
processes but also they frequently have special difficul-
ties with becoming fluent in their application. Before
discussing specific methods for the diagnostic assess-
ment of these word reading skills, one general issue re-
garding reading assessment requires discussion.
First, the assessment that will be recommended here
is very different from the “authentic literacy assess-
ment” that is currently advocated by many reading pro-
fessionals (Paris, et al., 1992). Authentic assessment is
different in at least two ways from the reading assess-
ment measures we will be discussing. First, the goal of
“authentic assessment” is to measure children’s applica-
tion of broad literacy skills to authentic tasks, like gath-
ering information for a report, use of literacy as a
medium for social interactions, or ability to read a selec-
AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 6
SPRING/SUMMER 1998
tion and then write a response to it. It also seeks to
measure children’s enjoyment, ownership, and involve-
ment in literacy activities both at school and at home.
This kind of assessment is a clear complement to
the type of assessments we will describe for monitor-
ing growth in word level reading skills. All of the liter-
acy outcomes that are part of authentic assessment are
important parts of a total literacy assessment program.
After all, if a child can read, but does not enjoy reading
and does not apply important literacy skills to every-
day tasks, then some important goals of literacy in-
struction have not been attained.
However, since these procedures are focused on
high-level reading outcomes, they cannot provide pre-
cise information about level of performance on impor-
tant subskills in reading. If a child’s overall perfor-
mance on authentic literacy tasks is limited, it is fre-
quently difficult to obtain a precise estimate of the
specific component skills that are weak. The goal of
the kind of assessments we will discuss here is to
quantify the degree of skill a child possesses in word
identification processes that have been shown to be a
critical foundation for overall reading success.
Commonly used diagnostic
measures of word reading ability
It is beyond the scope of this article to identify all
the available tests of word level reading skills. Rather, I
will provide examples of measurement strategies from
the most commonly used measures.
Sight word reading ability. Two measures are widely
used in this area, and both involve the same assessment
strategy.The Word Identification subtest from the Wood-
cock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (Woodcock, 1987),
and the reading subtest of the Wide Range Achieve-
ment Test-3 (Wilkinson, 1995) both require children to
read lists of words that gradually increase in length and
complexity while decreasing in frequency of occur-
rence in printed English. For example, the easiest three
words on the Word Identification subtest are go, the,
and me, words of mid-level difficulty are pioneer, in-
quire, and wealth, and the hardest three are
epigraphist, facetious, and shillelagh.
Neither of these widely used tests place stringent
time pressure on students, so both phonetic decoding
processes and sight word processes can be used to
identify words on these lists. Both tests have been
normed nationally, and one of their strengths is that
they allow a direct assessment of children’s ability to
identify words solely on the basis of the word’s
spelling. When reading text, children also have context
clues available to assist word identification, and thus
text-based measures, although they may be more “au-
thentic” in one sense, are less direct in their assessment
of the kinds of word-processing skills that are particu-
larly deficient in children with reading problems.
Phonetic reading ability. The single best measure of
children’s ability to apply knowledge of letter-sound
correspondences in decoding words is provided by
measures of nonword reading (Share & Stanovich,
1995).The Word Attack subtest of the Woodcock Read-
ing Mastery Test-Revised (Woodcock, 1987) is a good
example of this kind of diagnostic test. It consists of a
series of increasingly complex nonwords that children
are asked to “sound out as best they can.” The three
easiest items on the test are ree, ip, and din; items of
moderate difficulty are rejune, depine, and viv; and
the three hardest items are pnir, ceisminadolt, and
byrcal. Because the words are presented out of con-
text, they stress the child’s ability to fully analyze each
word to produce the correct pronunciation. On the
other hand, measures such as this do not allow an as-
sessment of children’s ability to combine phonetic de-
coding with use of context to arrive at a word’s cor-
rect pronunciation. However, since both good and
poor readers appear able to use context equally well
(as long as the context is under stood, Share &
Stanovich, 1995), this is not an important omission on
a diagnostic measure of word reading ability.
Word reading fluency. Word reading fluency mea-
sures have typically measured rate of reading con-
nected text. One of the more widely used measures in
this area is the Gray Oral Reading Test-3rd Edition.
(Wiederholt & Bryant, 1992). This test consists of thir-
teen increasingly difficult passages, each followed by
five comprehension questions. A measure of oral read-
ing rate is obtained by recording the time it takes for
the child to read each passage. One potential problem
with the Gray Oral Reading Test is that it does not pro-
vide a very sensitive measure of individual differences
in word reading ability at very low levels of perfor-
mance, such as those found in beginning first graders,
or disabled readers through second grade. The pas-
sages simply begin at too high a level for children with
very poor or undeveloped reading skills to display the
word reading skills they actually possess.
In an effort to provide measures of fluency and ac-
curacy in word reading skill that are simple to adminis-
ter and sensitive to individual differences across a
broad range of reading skills, we are currently develop-
ing simple measures of Word Reading Efficiency and
NonWord Efficiency (Torgesen & Wagner, 1997). In
both of these measures, children are shown lists of in-
creasingly difficult words and nonwords and asked to
read as many words as possible in forty-five seconds.
There are two forms to each test, and the child’s score
is simply the average number of words read in forty-
five seconds. Initial evaluations indicate that these
measures are very reliable (parallel form reliabilities
vary between .97 and .98 for kindergarten through
fifth grade).They are also highly correlated with corre-
sponding measures from the Woodcock Reading Mas-
ter Test-Revised at early grades (when children often
run out of words they can read before they run out of
time, correlations range from .89 to .94) and slightly
less correlated (.86 to .88) at fourth grade, when flu-
ency of word reading processes becomes more impor-
tant to performance on the tests.These tests have been
standardized nationally and will be available from PRO-
ED publishing company in late summer 1998. If a sin-
gle form of each test is administered, it will provide in-
dices of growth in phonetic decoding and sight word
reading that can be administered several times during
the year and that take a very short amount of time to
give.
7 AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
SPRING/SUMMER 1998
To summarize, adequate monitoring of the growth
of children’s word reading abilities should include out-
of-context measures of word reading ability, phonetic
decoding ability (as measured by ability to read non-
words), and word reading fluency. The fluency mea-
sures become more important after about second to
third grade, when children have acquired a fund of
word reading skills they can apply with reasonable ac-
curacy. Measures that involve out-of-context word read-
ing more directly assess the kinds of word reading
skills that are particularly problematic for children
with reading disabilities because they eliminate the
contextual support on which these children rely heav-
ily. To obtain a complete picture of overall reading de-
velopment, however, it is also important to observe the
way that the child integrates all sources of information
about words in text, and this can only be estimated by
carefully observing children as they read connected
passages. l
REFERENCES
Adams, M.J. (l990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about
print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Allington, R.L. (l984). Content coverage and contextual reading in
reading groups. Journal of Reading Behavior, 16, 85-96.
Allington, R.L., & McGill-Franzen, A. (1994). Reading and the mildly
handicapped. International Encyclopedia of Education, Oxford,
U.K.: Pergamon.
Brown, A. L., Palincsar, A. S., & Purcell, L. (l986). Poor readers: Teach,
don’t label. In U. Neisser (Ed.) The School Achievement of Minor-
ity Children: New Perspectives. (pp. 105-143) NJ: Lawrence Erl-
baum Associates.
Ehri, L.C. (in press). Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is essential for
learning to read words in English. In J. Metsala & L. Ehri (Eds.).
Word recognition in beginning reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Fletcher, J. M., Shaywitz, S. E., Shankweiler, D. P., Katz, L., Liberman, I.Y.,
Stuebing, K.K., Francis, D. J., Fowler, A. E., & Shaywitz, B. A. (1994).
Cognitive profiles of reading disability: Comparisons of discrep-
ancy and low achievement definitions. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 86, 6-23.
Foorman, B.R., Francis, D.J., Fletcher, J.M., Schatschneider, C., & Mehta,
P. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing
reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educational Psychol-
ogy.
Francis, D.J., Shaywitz, S.E., Stuebing, K.K., Shaywitz, B.A., & Fletcher,
J.M. (1996). Developmental lag versus deficit models of reading dis-
ability: A longitudinal, individual growth curves analysis. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 88, 3-17.
Gaskins, I.W., Ehri, L.C., Cress, C., O’Hara, C., & Donnelly, K. (1996).
Procedures for word learning: Making discoveries about words. The
Reading Teacher, 50, 312-327.
Gough, P. B. (1996). How children learn to read and why they fail. An-
nals of Dyslexia, 46, 3-20.
Hoien, T., Lundberg, I., Stanovich, K. E., & Bjaalid, I. (1995). Compo-
nents of phonological awareness. Reading and Writing: An Inter-
disciplinary Journal, 7, 171-188.
Hoover, W.A., & Gough, P.B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Read-
ing and Writing, 2, 127-160.
Juel, C. (1996). What makes literacy tutoring effective? Reading Re-
search Quarterly, 31, 268-289.
Liberman, I.Y., Shankweiler, D., & Liberman, A.M. (1989). The alpha-
betic principle and learning to read. In Shankweiler, D. & Liber-
man, I.Y. (Eds.), Phonology and reading disability: Solving the
reading puzzle (pp.1-33).Ann Arbor, MI: U. of Michigan Press.
Lindamood, C. H., & Lindamood, P. C. (l984). Auditory Discrimination
in Depth. Austin,TX: PRO-ED, Inc.
Lundberg, I., Frost, J., & Peterson, O. (l988). Effects of an extensive pro-
gram for stimulating phonological awareness in pre-school chil-
dren. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 263-284.
Mastropieri, M.A. & Scruggs, T.E. (1997). Best practices in promoting
reading comprehension in students with learning disabilities: 1976-
1996. Remedial and Special Education, 18, 197-213.
Nagy, W.E., Herman, P.A., & Anderson, R.C. (1985). Learning words
from context. Reading Research Quarterly, 20, 233-253.
Oka, E., & Paris, S. (1986). Patterns of motivation and reading skills in
underachieving children. In S. Ceci (Ed.), Handbook of cognitive,
social, and neuropsychological aspects of learning disabilities
(Vol. 2). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Rashotte, C.A., Torgesen, J.K., & Wagner, R.K. (1997). Growth in read-
ing accuracy and fluency as a result of intensive intervention.
Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Florida Branch of
the International Dyslexia Association, Miami, FL, September.
Scarborough, H.S. (1998). Early identification of children at risk for
reading disabilities: Phonological awareness and some other
promising predictors. In Shapiro, B.K., Accardo, P.J., & Capute, A.J.
(Eds.) Specific Reading Disability: A view of the spectrum. (pp. 75-
120).Timonium, MD:York Press, Inc.
Share, D.L., & Stanovich, K.E. (1995). Cognitive processes in early read-
ing development:A model of acquisition and individual differences.
Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology,
1, 1-57.
Siegel, L.S. (1989). IQ is irrelevant to the definition of learning disabili-
ties. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 22, 469-479.
Stanovich, K.E., & Siegel, L.S. (1994).The phenotypic performance pro-
file of reading-disabled children: A regression-based test of the
phonological-core variable-difference model. Journal of Educa-
tional Psychology, 86, 24-53.
Stanovich, K.E. (l986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences
of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Re-
search Quarterly, 21, 360-406.
Stanovich, K.E., Cunningham, A.E., & Cramer, B.B. (l984). Assessing
phonological awareness in kindergarten children: Issues of task
comparability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 38, 175-
190.
Torgesen, J.K. (in press). Assessment and instruction for phonemic
awareness and word reading skills. In H.W. Catts and A.G. Kamhi
(Eds.) Language Basis of Reading Disabilities. Needham Heights,
MA:Allyn & Bacon.
Torgesen, J.K. (1998) Individual differences in response to reading
intervention. Paper presented at the Pacific Coast Research Con-
ference, LaJolla, CA, February.
Torgesen, J.K., & Burgess, S.R. (1998). Consistency of reading-related
phonological processes throughout early childhood: Evidence from
longitudinal-correlational and instructional studies. In J. Metsala & L.
Ehri (Eds.). Word Recognition in Beginning Reading. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Torgesen, J.K., Burgess, S., & Rashotte, C.A. (1996). Predicting phono-
logically based reading disabilities: What is gained by waiting a
year? Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Society for the
Scientific Study of Reading, New York,April.
Torgesen, J.K.,Wagner, R.K., & Rashotte, C.A. (1994). Longitudinal stud-
ies of phonological processing and reading. Journal of Learning
Disabilities, 27, 276-286.
Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R.K., & Rashotte, C.A. (1997). The prevention
and remediation of severe reading disabilities: Keeping the end in
mind. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1, 217-234.
Vaughn, S. & Schumm, J.S. (1996) Classroom ecologies: Classroom in-
teractions and implications for inclusion of students with learning
disabilities (pp. 107-124). In D. L. Speece & B.K. Keogh (Eds.), Re-
search on classroom ecologies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum As-
sociates.
Wagner, R.K., Torgesen, J.K., & Rashotte, C.A. (1994). The development
of reading-related phonological processing abilities: New evidence
of bi-directional causality from a latent variable longitudinal study.
Developmental Psychology, 30, 73-87.
Wagner, R.K., Torgesen, J.K., Rashotte, C.A., Hecht, S.A., Barker, T.A.,
Burgess, S.R., Donahue, J., & Garon, T. (1997). Changing causal rela-
tions between phonological processing abilities and word-level
reading as children develop from beginning to fluent readers: A
five-year longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 33, 468-
479.
Whitehurst, G.J. & Lonigan, C.J. (in press). Child development and
emergent literacy. Child Development, 69.
Wilson, B.A. (1988). Instructor manual. Millbury, MA: Wilson Lan-
guage Training.
Yopp, H.K. (l988). The validity and reliability of phonemic awareness
tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 159-177.
AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 8