Assessing accuracy and rate in English
Accuracy can be assessed by the percentage of words a reader can read correctly. Informal reading inventories can use levels of performance charts such as:
Independent level: 98-100%
Instructional level: 90-97%
Frustration level: below 90%
Readers who score in the 97-100% range are able to read without assistance. Readers who score within the 90-96% range are able to read with some assistance by teachers. Readers who score below 90% in word accuracy find texts too challenging to read, even with assistance. They either need more vocabulary instruction and/or decoding skills, and, of course, comprehension skills once decoding and vocabulary are acquired.
Here is a quick way to measure both accuracy and rate. Accuracy refers to how well students use decoding skills. Rate is how many words they can accurately decode in one minute.
1. Find a passage of approximately 250 words written at the student's grade placement level.
2. Ask the student to read the passage for one minute. Tape-record the reading. Emphasize that the text should be read aloud in a normal way.
3. Mark any uncorrected errors made by the student such as: mispronunciations, substitutions, reversals, omissions, or words pronounced by the examiner after a wait of two to three seconds without an attempt or response from the student. Mark the end point in the text after one minute of reading.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 with two different passages. Use the median or middle score for analysis.
5. Divide the number of words read correctly per minute by the total number of words read. This number will be a percentage. Compare the student's performance against the following norms: