After conducting this assessment, I felt that it was a cumbersome assessment. The testing for one student took forty-five minutes. I had to assess the student on four word lists, three oral reading passages, three silent reading passages, and one listening comprehension passage in order to meet the testing criteria for finding the independent, instructional, and frustration reading levels. The student even said, after all the testing was complete, "that it took a really long time and I'm tired." As the administrator of the test, I also thought that it took an extremely long time to give, not including the time to tally the scores and complete the analysis sheets. I think that a running record is a better quick assessment to give to find information about the student's decoding skills, fluency, and comprehension. However, this assessment is better for looking in-depth at the student's miscues and doing an in-depth analysis of all the percentages. The worksheets that accompany the test provide a format for conducting the analysis and everything is laid out for the administrator in way that enables critical thinking, even if the administrator is unfamiliar with the types of miscues.
I tested the student in the school office, in one of the quiet, personal work areas. A few times during the first passage, I noticed that some talking in the office was distracting the student, but he kept reading. For the remainder of the test, we moved to the conference room, which had fewer distractions, and less noise.
The other thing that I did not like about this assessment is that it is not conducive to use with a child that is impacted by language. Some of the comprehension questions are wordy and unclear and could have been worded in a way that would be much more clear and able to understand what they are asking. In this case, the child is impacted by language and struggled to understand some of the comprehension questions. When I first asked the question he asked me to repeat it, and then he said, "I don't know." I decided to restate the question leaving out some of the unnecessary words or changing the order of the words. When I did this he was able to understand and answer the question correctly every time. I think this is incredibly important to consider when giving this assessment to a student because this factor alone could completely skew the results. The other difference between this assessment and a Leveled Reading Passage (LRP) or District Reading Assessment (DRA) is that the LRPs and DRAs have pictures. For a student who is impacted by language and retaining information in short term memory, reading a story without any picture cues would be incredibly difficult.
As a result of these observations after conducting a LRP and DRA and an Informal Reading Inventory (IRI), I found that the IRI is much more sensitive than the LRP and DRA. The criteria for independent and instructional levels on the IRI are more difficult than the LRP and DRA. The comprehension questions on a LRP and DRA are literal and do not involve higher levels of comprehension. However, the comprehension questions on the IRI involve higher levels of thinking such as, inference and cause and effect.