Diagnostic Tests

These are used on select students - those who may have experienced difficulties during the screeners/benchmarks assessment. These tests can help to identify specific issues a student may be experiencing - and can help to guide specific intervention strategies.

Resources

adapted by Linda Farrell

This survey is designed to pinpoint specific difficulties struggling readers have decoding words with various vowel spellings and words with more than one syllable. The Survey is NOT exhaustive. Rather, it is carefully designed to identify specific skills the student may not have mastered. 

by Jerry Johns

This book contains a collection of early literacy assessments for young students as well as reading comprehension and competence assessments for older students. 

This collection of assessments is primarily designed to help teachers identify each student's independent, instructional, and frustration reading levels. Guides are provided to help teachers determine each child's different reading levels. Some of the reading passages are equivalent in difficulty, so teachers can use this assessment as a pre- and post-test of reading competence. The Phoneme Awareness (Spelling) assessment is really a test of letter-sound knowledge — the Phoneme Segmentation test is actually a test of phoneme awareness.

Evaluate the acquisition of basic concepts of a child, which is strongly related to cognitive and language development as well as early childhood academic achievement.

DRA

Diagnostic Reading Assessment

The Developmental Reading Assessment®, Second Edition, PLUS (DRA2+) is a formative reading assessment in which teachers are able to systematically observe, record, and evaluate changes in student reading performance. DRA2+ is a proven, criterion-referenced assessment and includes recommendations for scaffolded support to increase student reading proficiency. DRA2+ has undergone rigorous field-testing and is supported by sound validity and reliability analyses.

Instruction suggestions are provided to help teachers translate assessment data into instruction focused on student learning needs.

DST

Decoding Skills Test

The Decoding Skills Test (DST) helps you diagnose and treat specific reading disabilities, including dyslexia. It gives you a clear picture of the processes involved in reading and shows you the particular area in which an individual needs help.

Designed for children and adults who are reading at first- through fifth-grade levels, the DST provides a diagnostic profile of the decoding skills that are essential to reading comprehension.

While the DST can be used for screening, it is primarily diagnostic and prescriptive. The test is especially useful with students already known to have reading difficulties, including dyslexia. Because it detects specific aspects of the reading problem, the DST provides clear treatment guidelines. It helps you form reading groups, make program decisions, and determine appropriate remediation.

Evaluate student reading and comprehension ability with reliable and robust universal screening that is aligned to Leveled Literacy Intervention, and determine each child's instructional level for guided reading according to the Fountas & Pinnell A-Z Text Level Gradient™ for guided reading.

Group Reading Assessment & Diagnostic Evaluation

The GRADE™ (Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation) is a diagnostic reading test that that determines what developmental skills PreK-12 students have mastered and where students need instruction or intervention.

Oral and Written Language Scales

Identify and remediate oral and written language problems.

Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening

The Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) provides a comprehensive assessment of young children’s knowledge of the important literacy fundamentals that are predictive of future reading success.

PALS consists of three instruments, PALS-PreK (for preschool students), PALS-K (for kindergartners), and PALS 1-3 (for students in Grades 1-3).

The PM Benchmark Reading Assessment Resource has been designed to assess students' instructional and independent reading levels using unseen, meaningful texts. This brand new comprehensive resource provides accurately levelled fiction and nonfiction texts ranging progressively from Kindergarten to end of Grade 4.

Specific Learning Disability Identification Toolkit

This Toolkit provides a clear vision of best practice related to an RTI-based SLD Identification process.

RTI Based SLD Identification Toolkit Worksheet - for the documentation process

The Abecedarian was designed to provide diagnostic information about early reading skills. Using this assessment information, teachers can maximize their effectiveness by individualizing their instruction to each student’s learning needs.

The authors recommend using certain subtests as a screen for all students, and using the rest of the subtests to more carefully examine students who did not do well on the screen. This assessment is appropriate for kindergarten and beginning-of-year 1st grade.

Test of Phonological Awareness

Measure your student's ability to isolate individual phonemes in spoken words and understand the relationships between letters and phonemes in order to determine if she's at risk for developing early reading skills.

The WRAT3 provides valid and reliable information on individual achievement. It identifies the level of coding performance and helps to identify learning disabilities in reading, spelling, and arithmetic when used in conjunction with a comprehensive test of general ability.