Informal Reading Inventories (Reflection Questions-Chapter 3)

There is a lot of information to take in when learning to teach reading and to assess the skills that are being taught. So many terms and strategies have long names, or no names at all-just a bunch of letters! I am being overly dramatic, but sometimes it can be overwhelming to look at a student knowing that she needs help and not knowing which of the many strategies you have learned will be the most beneficial. You should probably start with an IRI, by the way. So what's an IRI?!? It's an "informal reading inventory"- a gallery of valuable reading skills that have or have not been mastered by a student.

At times teachers must give a formal reading inventory that has been sanctioned by a school district and is mostly free of all subjectivity (such as DIBELS-click for info). However, an informal assessment is a tool that you may use as often as you need, and in any form that you may need. What I mean is that you can decide if your student needs to do the entire assessment again, or just needs to be checked in one area. That makes it a "formative" assessment that will guide you in the instructional needs of that student.  It is my opinion that a great teacher does a lot more formative assessment than "summative" (final) testing. They value the journey that the student must take in order to get to their goal of being a successful reader.

When strategies are given for how to administer an IRI, usually the first item to address is tapping into the student's prior knowledge of the topic in a reading passage. The oral reading and comprehension are greatly improved when there is a connection made to past learning. (Click here for an article that supports this claim very well.) When this step is skipped the student is likely to score lower than his actual ability.

The running records in the text show a student who has grown from Level B books to Level K during the course of the school year. As the student moved to the higher Levels the substitution errors increased. The substitutions were mostly visual errors. The accuracy rate only increased by 3% and did not go above the instructional level for those texts.

What benefits or disadvantages are there to giving shortened IRIs? One benefit is that you can get useful data rather quickly. Also, the students will be less likely to experience stress or fatigue during a shortened IRI, which can impact performance.

What benefits are there to giving a full pre-post administration? The benefit of this type of administration is a thorough view of the reading practices of the students tested. The information gleaned can inform instructional practices for the current year, as well as the future.

What benefits are there to a single-passage IRI administration? Although you do  not gain enough information to determine the difficulty level for the students, you can use it to check for "normative" progress. You can determine if each student is reading "on grade-level", Obviously, this would also take less time to administer.