Reading Assessments: How Do We Measure Reading?

Effective reading instruction begins with understanding a student’s unique needs — and assessments are the cornerstone of that process. For students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), specialized assessments are critical for identifying strengths and pinpointing specific areas of difficulty, while curriculum-based assessments provide regular monitoring to track progress and inform instruction.

Your child’s reading ability will usually be part of your initial assessment for an IEP or your triennial assessment every three years. Your school may also use Curriculum-Based Measurements (more on this later) for all children in the school or may use a reading intervention program that includes regular assessments. Many of the studies that show the effectiveness of ‘structured literacy’ include this type of regular assessment.

A useful assessment, especially in your triennial evaluation, won’t just track overall progress but also zoom in on specific areas like phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This approach, based on Scarborough’s Reading Rope, helps identify which skills might need extra attention and support. By using assessments aligned with the science of reading, teachers can provide targeted help to ensure every child, including yours, has the tools they need to thrive as a reader.

Reading ability is often broken down into separate tests that assess:

• Alphabet and Letter Recognition
• Phonological Awareness: letter sounds, rhyming words, segments sounds in words, blends sounds, and identifying individual sounds.
• Rapid Automatic Naming: colors, objects, letters, and numbers.
• Word Recognition: regular and irregular words
• Word Attack: recognizing nonsense words.
• Reading Vocabulary: antonyms, synonyms. The student is asked to complete analogies in response to written words.
• Reading Comprehension: tested with open-ended or multiple-choice questions with alternative responses.
• Fluency: the student reads passages aloud while being timed. Only correct words are counted.
• Automaticity: reading real and nonsense words while being timed.
• Listening comprehension: tests the student’s ability to listen to a passage read aloud and answer comprehension questions.

In an initial IEP or triennial IEP, standardized assessments will be used to evaluate the student’s reading ability, among other skills. This is commonly done using tests such as the Woodcock-Johnson IV (WJIV) Test of Academic Achievement, Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement(KTEA-III), and the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT-III or WIAT-IV). These tests look at a variety of academic skills, including reading. The WIAT-IV also includes a dyslexia risk screen. There are also standardized tests that measure specific skills such as the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP2), often used to test students who are suspected to have dyslexia.

Parents cannot insist on or limit their consent to evaluation to specific assessments, but it may be helpful to talk to your child’s teacher about the tools and measures they plan to use and share your concerns about testing. Your assessment plan should be made with your input and that can include a conversation with the teacher and psychologist about what might be the most effective way to assess your child’s reading ability and hone in on specific areas of strength and need. Your child must be evaluated in all areas of concern, so make sure you mention your concern with specific reading skills.

Note that parents do have a right to request an Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE) if they feel the school’s assessment does not provide an adequate assessment of the child’s strengths and challenges. Parents can also ask for an IEE if the school failed to test in an area of concern that they noted. If you request an IEE, the school must either file a due process case to show why it is not necessary or grant the new assessment at their expense. Then the parent can find an evaluator of their choice.

Not all reading assessments are going to be a right fit or fully account for the diverse learning profiles of children with disabilities, potentially overlooking strengths or underestimating potential. Our experts have very different advice on the usefulness of these tests based on the different abilities of the students they work with.

Standardized tests

Dorreen advocates mostly for students who have specific learning disabilities and finds the WJIV most useful because the reading scores can be broken down into subtests that reveal which foundational skills a student is missing and needs to focus on. These subtest scores can be reported as age or grade level equivalents as well as relative proficiency scores (RPI) out of 90. In this clip Dorreen explains how she uses the subtest scores.

Parent tip on assessments:

If your child has inconsistent reading scores on standardized tests, request the test protocols, including all the raw scores. This will provide more information about where their specific issues lie. You can request the scores using a parent records request letter. For example, on the WJIV, it’s important to go beyond overall reading scores and examine specific areas like Word Attack versus Passage Reading. Additionally, identifying the point at which Word Attack words became too challenging provides valuable insight.

On the other hand, Dr. Lemons and Dr. Whitbread both express frustration with standardized assessments like the WJIV because, when working with students with intellectual disabilities, communication challenges, or Down syndrome, standardized tests often fail to discern growth or strength in the lower performance range. Standardized tests often have measurement floors based on the expected proficiency for an age range or grade level, so that testing students performing below the first percentile really just measures the assessment floor rather than showing the student’s learning or growth. That can be very depressing for the whole IEP team and not very helpful.

Criterion-referenced tests

Criterion-referenced tests, “which compare a person’s knowledge or skills against a predetermined standard, learning goal, performance level, or other criterion” are often more effective at measuring reading skills, and can be adapted for this purpose by using the test for a younger age range. The test might not give a valid score in terms of grade level proficiency but it can help to show up which of the areas of the reading rope still need work for your child to become a skilled reader.

Parent tip on assessments:

If your child has a significant cognitive disability and is working below grade level, ask for their reading to be tested using a criterion-referenced test such as the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading or DIBELS so that their foundational reading skills can be assessed. These tests can indicate the students proficiency without age or grade level norming, such as:

• Diagnostic Assessment of Reading (DAR-2)
• DIBELS
• Criterion Test of Basic Skills-2 (CTOBS-2)
• AimsWebPlus
• Core Assessment

Exploring other evaluation options

There are many other testing options that parents can explore with their IEP teams, for example:

• Dynamic assessment allows for the assessor to use accommodations that circumvent a student's challenges, such as alternative responses for non speakers.
• There are also standardized reading assessments that are recommended for non-speaking students because they include subtests that can be measured without speaking, such as:
  • Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test, (LAC-3)
  • Test of Reading Comprehension (TORC-4)
  • Diagnostic Assessment of Reading (DAR-2)
  • Test of Reading Comprehension (TORC-4)
  • Gray Silent Reading Tests (GSRT)
• Teachers can also assess students using work samples, including writing samples and spelling tests that indicate the student’s phonemic awareness and blending skills.
• Fluency, measured by counting the number of correct words the child can read per minute is a good overall measure of reading ability, especially in higher grades. There are a number of scales that show the expectation per grade level such as the 2017 Hasbrouck & Tindal Oral Reading Fluency Data. Our experts all saw fluency as a good measure because it is tied to multiple elements of reading, such as decoding and comprehension. However, it might not work well for students without adequate verbal fluency.

The most common way to assess students' reading is using curriculum-based measures (which include some criterion-referenced tests) that are tied to the “scope and sequence” of the structured literacy program the school is using (also called progress monitoring). “Scope” is the “what,” or all the areas of learning that the curriculum will cover. “Sequence” is the “when,” or the order in which skills are taught.

Curriculum-Based Measures can be used universally for all students in the classroom, such as the new reading screenings that will start in all California classrooms K-2 in the fall of 2025. These tests can also form a part of your child’s IEP assessment of present levels. Here are a few ways curriculum-based progress monitoring can help:

• To see how your child is progressing in areas like reading and writing
• To figure out which teaching strategies work best for your child
• To track your child’s progress toward their IEP goals
• To check if your child is holding on to skills they’ve already learned
• To make sure your child’s current instruction is meeting their needs

Dr. Lemons explains, “What we very frequently use, particularly for our learners who are still reading at a third grade or earlier level, is curriculum-based measurement or progress monitoring tools like DIBELS and AimsWebPlus, which can be very valuable because they are aligned with early reading skills.”

Structured literacy programs include regular progress monitoring, which means your child will take short tests or assessments to check their learning. These are often done every two weeks or so, depending on how often and intensely the program is being used. Your child might encounter these assessments in their general education classroom, as part of the school’s universal reading program, in a targeted reading intervention (like a tier 2 MTSS intervention), or even as part of their IEP’s specially designed instruction.

Examples of CBM:

• Orton Gillingham Intervention programs like Wilson and Barton often include a test and report that can be shared with parents.
• The Fountas & Pinelli Reading Gradient measures reading progression by assessing their comprehension and ability to read text of varying difficulty. The difficulty increases according to sentence complexity, vocabulary, text structure, and illustrations. The system was designed to ensure students have access to ‘leveled’ books, but is used by many schools to measure reading progress. This program has come under criticism for not being aligned to the Science of Reading. It was designed to be used with a balanced literacy approach.
• iReady reading scores are also used by many schools to monitor progress. The scores compare a child’s ability to average performance in their grade level. IReady looks for strengths and weaknesses in vocabulary, comprehension, phonics, and phonological awareness. The tests are scored based on grade level standards for reading but require considerable independence by students who self-administer the test. iReady Reports are shared with families on a regular basis but can take some practice to follow.

Key tip for parents: make sure there is a plan to track progress

Tracking your child’s reading progress is essential, especially if they have a disability. Dr. Whitbread highlights how important it is for parents to ensure there’s a clear plan for monitoring progress. She advises parents to go beyond just looking at graphs and data points to ask critical questions:

In the fall of 2025, all public schools in California will be required to screen all students from kindergarten to second-grade to help schools identify those at risk of reading challenges. Four tests have been approved and school districts will each adopt one of the four by July. These tests were not selected or intended as diagnostic tests for special education and students who are highlighted for intervention will not automatically be referred for an IEP. On the other hand a guidance letter from the Department of Education states that schools cannot delay evaluating a child for a suspected disability while waiting to see their Response to Intervention.

Since all students from K-2 will be screened, parents with children with developmental disabilities should anticipate that the test will identify their students as having reading difficulties, even if they are making significant progress on their reading goals. This might be a good opportunity to advocate for evidence-based reading instruction in your child’s IEP.

Understanding your child’s reading assessment results can help you advocate for the right support in their IEP. The more you understand the assessments, the better you can work with the IEP team to support your child’s reading growth. We’ve put together a list of things to be aware of and questions to ask your IEP team for both standardized and criterion-referenced tests.

For standardized tests such as Woodcock Johnson IV:

• When scores are presented as average, below average or well below average, ask for the actual scores and the Relative Proficiency Index (RPI)
• If the report only mentions general domain areas, ask the results for specific skills so that you can compare. For example if the child did worse on the subtest Word Attack compared to the subtest on reading a passage, ask what happened during Word Attack — where did the child get stuck?
• Look for inconsistent scores such as 110 (an above average score) on Word Attack but 73 (below average) on phonemic awareness. Ask the team how the child is able to read the words without relying on phonemic skills.
• Look for scores that are lower than the other skills to find your child’s challenges. Ask how the test was performed so you can understand the challenge that was presented, and look for a way to incorporate that skill into an IEP goal.
• Look for scores that are relatively higher than the other skills (even if still low) to find your child’s strengths. Ask how the test was performed so the team can incorporate that strength into future learning strategies. If every score is exactly 40, it's likely that 40 is the lowest possible score the test can measure — often called the "floor." In other words, the test can't assess anything below that point. This doesn't tell you much about the child's ability below the 40 mark. In this case, ask for a criterion-referenced test that can assess their skill level without comparing them to other children the same age or grade.

For criterion-referenced tests:

• Look for growth if you can – compare with previous tests.
• Look for inconsistency such as when the test was higher the last time they were tested.
• Where a child has met a goal and shows mastery of a skill, ask about how to maintain this skill as they move forward.
• Look for missing skills, for example a child is decoding but still lacks phonemic awareness — is that impacting overall fluency or comprehension because they are working so hard to read without their phonics skills, they have no working memory left for understanding the meaning of the words.
• Ask how the special designed instruction provided by their IEP is going to help your child learn these foundational skills and become a skilled reader.

Read more about progressing monitoring and using reading assessments in reading goals in our article Reading Goals in the IEP.