Imagine this: A capable third grader, yet frustrated with reading, is placed at a remedial reading level due to a faulty diagnostic assessment, stunting her educational growth.
Take the case of “Ava,” a 3rd grader initially misdiagnosed at a 1st grade reading level. Her initial tutor recommended years of slow-paced, beginner instruction—a plan that would have stifled her progress and potential.
Intrigued by Ava's story? Read on to discover how the right diagnostic assessment can rapidly transform a student's reading journey.
This is the second part of our series on the critical role of accurate diagnostic assessment in reading instruction, which began last week. For more of the backstory, read the overview here of Ava's shocking transformation in just 4 hours of reading instruction (despite an initial diagnosis of years of first grade work.)
The Initial Misdiagnosis from Poor Diagnostic Assessment
The father reached out to me via email since he knew I am a reading specialist.
He wrote:
My oldest (“Ava”) recently started 3rd grade and is struggling. She is not a strong reader, and in 3rd grade, everything is reading – even math. She often won't get the math problem right because she didn't read the word problem correctly.
Her school has a relationship with a reading therapist, and the reading therapist did an informal evaluation with her last week.
The results of this evaluation showed she does have significant gaps in her reading. What is hard to digest, though, is her recommendations. She wants Ava to work with her through her whole 1st and 2nd grade curriculum.
It's a lot of money ($65/half-hour) and, more importantly, time. We're struggling just to keep up with 3rd grade, so I'd hate to make her do this, too, unless it was absolutely necessary.
He went on to share what the reading therapist sent him about Ava's needs…
Ava is so sweet and a pleasure to work with. I had her read the sentences from the end of Book 3 (first grade level).
Here are some examples of what she read:
Kent did jump and yell when the lost raft.
(actual sentence: Kent did jump and yell when he lost the raft.)
A twig did drift past the thrift shopped in the blast of wind. (actual sentence: A twig did drift past the thrift shop in a blast of wind.)
A big branch struck Brench and he did flitch.
(actual sentence: A big branch struck Brent and he did flinch.)
Who's the cross goal with Bill?
(actual sentence: Who's the cross gal with Bill?)
She'll scald the wind child.
(actual sentence: She'll scold the wild child.)
Ava had difficulty answering comprehension questions about the sentences without going back and rereading them. Another clue that she isn't thinking about what she's reading is that when she read a word that didn't make sense, she didn't try to correct it, she just kept reading.
It's hard to say how long it will take because each child moves at their own pace. Some kids would have taken weeks to get through the Phonemic Awareness book that she did in one session.
Once we've gotten a few sessions under our belts, I'll have a better idea of how quickly she will progress and how long it will take.
There are 11 lessons in Book 3 (first grade level) and 14 lessons in Book (second grade level). After that, we would read chapter books and practice using all of the skills she's learned while writing chapter summaries.
I offered to help out Ava myself because I thought the assessment was weak and the prognosis for remediation would be much slower than almost every student I have ever remediated.
Barton Book 3 is estimated to take 3-6 months and Book 4 is estimated to take 6 months. Many take longer than these estimates in Barton, so it would be at least 12 months before the child would begin reading instruction at a 3rd grade level.
Waiting until AFTER those two Barton books are mastered to begin reading chapter books didn't sound like a good idea to me for a 3rd grader, especially given that she actually read a lot of rare words accurately, such as:
- twig
- drift
- blast
- struck
I was also concerned that the therapist extracted comprehension abilities from the oral reading of decodable sentences that were quite stilted in terms of readability for an early 3rd grader. Better to give natural or authentic text at various grade levels to see which one is instructional and which are frustrational (usually below 70% accurate with comprehension questions).
It's also better to measure decoding ability with a separate test. We recommend a nonsense word test.)
Accurate Diagnostic Assessment and Targeted Instruction Led to Two Year Growth in 4 Hours!
While the first reading therapist that Ava saw would have started her in Barton Book 3 at the CVCC/CCVC level with just short vowels and single syllable words, I assessed her as a much stronger reader only needing some support.
As a result of this different diagnosis, I placed Ava on our Streamlined Pathway (see image above) that's for those students reading at the 2nd Grade level and above. She was reading chapter books in our first full lesson and after just four hours of instruction her parents were amazed at how her reading and motivation were transformed!
Her father expressed it like this:
Not only was Ava making all A's for the first time and enjoying reading every night for pleasure, her dad reassessed again with the San Diego Quick Assessment and she is reading at the 5th grade level!
Yes, she was 2 years above grade before her 3rd grade year even ended!
Read more of Ava's story in our first installment of this series here or listen in to how amazed the dad is as he reflects on Ava's transformation here:
Ok, now that you know that this story has a happy ending, let's dive into a better way to diagnose a reading difficulty, with Ava's case study as a backdrop.
2 Simple Diagnostic Assessment Steps
Using a decodable text measure first and only to try to diagnose Ava's reading sub-skill needs did not work. Ava's true comprehension ability and overall reading achievement were obscured by the challenging sub-skill measure.
A better rule of thumb sequence for an efficient pinpointing of most reading difficulties is just 2 simple steps:
- First, assess the student's overall reading achievement level with a reading comprehension measure or a proxy.
- Second, based on the overall reading level and other intake information, assess relevant reading sub-skills such as…
- phonemic awareness,
- phonics knowledge,
- sound-based decoding (with a nonsense word reading measure),
- text reading fluency, and
- other measures (if needed).
#1 Assessing Overall Reading Achievement Level
As a private tutor, I usually assess overall reading achievement level with a Woodcock Reading Mastery Test, an oral reading and comprehension check of graded passages, school assessment data (such as NWEA's MAP), and parent/teacher report.
Not every teacher has the luxury to take that much time to assess each child or access to a individualized standardized test like the Woodcock, so we typically recommend Simplifiers determine overall reading achievement level by:
- gathering informal data (or school comprehension assessment data) about linguistic comprehension and/or reading comprehension, and
- giving the San Diego Quick Assessment, a publicly-available standardized measure.
The San Diego Quick Assessment is just word identification measure, so it might seem a poor proxy for overall reading achievement! Nevertheless, the ability to simply read a list of words and reading comprehension has a 0.8 correlation, which is quite high.
#2 Assessing Relevant Reading Sub-Skills
Thus, unless there are outstanding linguistic comprehension issues, such as English language learning or oral language difficulties (which might be gathered at intake), then word identification alone can tell us a lot about a child's current reading ability.
The importance of a word identification measure is especially important for a developing K-3 reader or anyone who's older, yet not fluent.
While an overall reading achievement level is an important place to start, it does not tell us what specifically the student needs to focus on for rapid improvement. So, our second step is to assess relevant reading sub-skills. I have discussed the importance of measuring a few key reading sub-skills previously here.
Ava's father gave her the San Diego Quick Assessment as a way of determining if the first tutor was on track or not. She scored at the 3rd grade level at the beginning of her 3rd grade year (see scoring sheet above), so she clearly wasn't as far off as the initial diagnosis had suggested.
He also assured me that her listening comprehension wasn't a concern of his. He was reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to her (a 4th-grade level novel) and she was understanding it well, for instance.
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Now I knew for sure that Ava would be better off with a different instructional plan!
I wasn't sure how weak her sound-based decoding skills were, however, because she definitely showed strengths and weaknesses in her oral reading of the Barton decodable sentences task (see purple box near beginning of post).
Since I needed more information in order to project how much tutoring time it might take for us working together and to plan for our first session, I gave Ava our usual measure of essential reading sub-skills, the Snapshot Informal Reading Assessment.
We teach how to deliver the Snapshot Informal Reading Assessment and how to plan for instruction based on it inside our Reading Simplified Academy.
If you've been waiting around for the perfect time to learn a more efficient and effective way to teach anyone how to read, what are you waiting for?
Jump into the Reading Simplified Academy now so you'll have the power of an approach that helped Ava grow 2 years in reading achievement after just 4 hours of instruction!
Refining Diagnostic Info Further with Our Snapshot Informal Reading Assessment
In my first virtual session with Ava, I had 3 objectives:
- get to know her and begin building rapport,
- fine-tune my understanding of her reading abilities, and
- begin with just 1 activity, Switch It.
Reading Simplified teachers utilize the Snapshot Informal Assessment as a way to dig into the reading sub-skills that may be lacking, especially in the decoding domain. The Snapshot Informal Assessment includes these three measures:
- Phoneme Segmentation
- Basic Code Letter-Sound Knowledge
- Nonsense/Rare Word Decoding
Together, these assessments can explain much of a child's overall sound-based decoding skill, which is the foundation of all higher level reading skills.
Watch below for one part of our first session together when I assessed some of her reading sub-skills using our Snapshot Informal Assessment.
0:00 – 1:09 Explaining the Upcoming Assessment
1:09 – end Giving Reading Simplified's Snapshot Informal Assessment
Notice how well Ava did with each section of our Snapshot Informal Reading Assessment! She was practically perfect and actually perfect, respectively, on the:
- Phonemic Segmentation measure and the
- Basic Phonics Letter-Sound Knowledge measure.
Even on the more challenging Nonsense/Rare Words Decoding measure, she demonstrated excellent word attack until she reached the harder sections of the test. The few words with advanced phonics info, such as “fean,” is the only area that I might expect a strong 3rd grade reader to do better.
Thus, by gathering more information, we have now demonstrated that this 3rd grader is able to read, instructionally, at a 3rd grade level and most of her reading sub-skills are pretty strong.
One can see that sometimes she takes awhile to do a task, however, so that lack of automaticity may explain why she is struggling with reading in school and with the Barton decodable text sentence reading task.
This pattern of “just slightly off” sub-skills, with grade-level, or near grade-level, reading is common and usually can be resolved rapidly with targeted instruction that shores up sound-based decoding skill and automaticity: A strength of the Reading Simplified system.
(Image from Handbook on the Science of Early Literacy, 2003, p. 12)
The Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Reading
These 2 simple diagnostic steps (i.e., assess overall reading level and then reading sub-skills) may make the process seem deceptively easy given that Ava's case was not that complex.
She was truly struggling in school, had just been identified as ADD, didn't like to read, and was prone to reading errors. Nevertheless, she was only a bit behind. With an efficient reading approach such as Reading Simplified, she only needed the lightest of intervention touches.
“What do readers who are really far behind need,” you may be wondering?
I still would follow the same simple 2 diagnostic assessment steps intially. Yet, I might need to dig much deeper into other reading sub-skills and related cognitive/emotional issues.
For a bigger picture on how to diagnose almost any reading difficulty, Young-Suk Grace Kim's new Direct and Indirect Effects Reading Model (DIER) is a helpful construct.
Kim explains that the DIER is…
“an integrative theoretical model that builds on and integrates influential theoretical models and lines of work such as the SVR [Simple View of Reading], the triangle model (Harm & Seidenberg, 2004), construction-integration model (Kintsch, 1988), reading systems framework (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014), and automaticity theory (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974) into a single unifying model. The DIER is a component skills model that specifies individuals' skills and knowledge…that contribute to reading comprehension, and the relations among skills (p. 11).”
This Direct and Indirect Effects Reading Model is new and is contending with a few other models that seek to expand on the well-documented validity of the Simple View of Reading by Gough and Tunmer. Kim's DIER model is my favorite because it resonates with my experiences as a reading therapist, and it's similar to a model I attempted to build in my dissertation many moons ago. 😉
I know what you're thinking, “This model has a lot going on!”
For the purposes of this post, just focus on a few things….
First, notice the larger boxes–Word Reading and Listening Comprehension. These map onto the Simple View of Reading 2 components.
Then see how those 2 components feed into text-reading fluency, and then above that, reading comprehension.
Reading comprehension is at the top and center because that's the big kahuna for reading components, right?
Are you following the model so far?
Next, notice the elements that wrap around the two main components of word reading and listening comprehension, such as executive function or social-emotional abilities.
Those cognitive and affective components can affect how a child reads, right?
There's more packed into the model but that overview is adequate for today's purposes.
Now let's consider my 2-step diagnostic assessment idea, in light of the DIER model.
Assess Reading Comprehension First
As discussed above, we first assess overall reading achievement ability, or reading comprehension ability. I highlighted that component in the DIER model below. See how central to reading outcomes this element is in the model?
That's why it's first!
Recall Ava was overall reading like a 3rd grader, according to the San Diego Quick Assessment and the parental report that she could comprehend language well.
Assess Relevant Reading Sub-Skills Second
Once we know a student's reading comprehension level, then we may still need to dig a bit deeper if we're concerned they're not yet reaching their potential. This brings us to my 2nd step in the diagnostic assessment process.
See how I've highlighted several reading sub-skills in the DIER model above? They represent the primary diagnostic considerations a reading therapist might examine, for most situations.
[If a psychologist is involved in helping diagnose a child's needs, s/he may provide more assessment data such as general cognitive abilities or executive function. However, reading tutors and classroom teachers rarely have access to this level of information. The good news is that with the reading sub-skills info presented in the highlighted domains above, one can still make an excellent intervention instructional plan.]
Recall how with Ava, I just assessed Word Reading components and got informal parental report on Listening Comprehension to begin instruction. I could have pushed further for more info about text reading fluency and social-emotional issues, but it did not seem essential for just beginning instruction.
There's a fine line we tread as tutors between gathering a strong diagnostic assessment viewpoint and not tiring or irritating our student or parents with too much testing!
Importantly, once we begin teaching, we also can gather much more diagnostic information. Indeed, the observations we have while the child is in the real process of reading real texts with us over time may be just as valuable, if not more, than isolated reading measures.
Most Common Reading Diagnostic Considerations for K-3
While the DIER model is thorough and helpful for thinking of most explanations for why a child may be struggling with reading, a reading teacher may be able to address most reading problems with beginning readers (i.e., K-3rd grade levels) with a simplified version.
In the above image of the DIER, I've highlighted the Word Reading and Text Reading Fluency components in yellow. They represent the most common diagnostic considerations for developing readers who are not also learning the English language.
The social-emotional domain is in a different color as it may of secondary importance.
Is the child totally resistant to any challenge in reading because of past reading experiences? That certainly may play into your diagnostic plan.
“But what about listening comprehension,” many may be wondering?
It is incredibly important for the lifespan of every reader. Indeed, listening comprehension is the biggest factor in reading achievement…when you look outside of the early word reading acquisition window.
Nevertheless, when a child can't read the words, her listening comprehension isn't likely her main challenge. If she knows the English language, she can likely understand The Cat and the Hat or a Magic Tree House book–if they're read orally to her.
We want to focus on her main challenge–word reading–with concerted effort for a short while. I like to think of it as a blitz!
In a few weeks or months, with the Reading Simplified method, she will be reading text well and reading independently more and more. THEN we can turn our instructional focus more toward listening comprehension and building background knowledge.
Truly that should be the main purpose of school.
Yet expanding knowledge and language happen only after we put in the early “sweat equity” to ensure that every child has access to the code, and she knows she IS a reader.
[Don't worry–each lesson involves reading a text and discussing it so it's not as if comprehension and language building are absent. They are just not our primary focus for a short season (unless the child simultaneously needs language support as a secondary most pressing need).]
Thus, our second diagnostic step for planning for good instructional match often just entails word reading measures such as:
- phonemic awareness,
- phonics knowledge,
- nonsense word reading, and/or
- oral reading fluency.
Inside the Reading Simplified Academy we take these simple diagnostic bits of information and help teachers and parents plan accelerated lessons so that most children learn to read rapidly.
For those special cases that take more thought, we can later turn to the other components in the Direct and Indirect Effects Reading Model. Many teachers will have those who are multilingual learners OR those with a Developmental Language Delay, so a deeper dive into the Listening Comprehension domain can be helpful as well. If a student's language abilities do not allow him to comprehend grade level reading material, then language intervention may be a second Most Pressing Need, above and beyond a Word Reading focus.
To wrap up, I've attempted to show the high value of accurate diagnostic assessment for instructional planning.
I've also tried to defend a simple 2-step diagnostic assessment process of
- finding reading level and then
- assessing relevant reading sub-skills.
This process certainly worked well for Ava, as we gathered little assessment information and only 4 hours of instruction before she grew to be 2 years ahead in reading–and began reading 45 minutes for pleasure every night!
Her story is not that unique as I've personally seen hundreds of children learn to read in hours instead of years.
And that's what we want for you and your reader(s)!
Your Turn!
What do you think of Ava's story?
How do these 2 diagnostic assessment steps resonate with you? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below!
