Clinical Assessment of Grade-Level Reading Abilities: Focus on Fluency and Comprehension

This 37 slide presentation describes how to perform clinical assessments of grade-level reading fluency and reading comprehension of elementary-aged and adolescent students. It provides information regarding how professionals can conduct a thorough analysis of the student’s reading rate, accuracy, and prosody. It also reviews in detail appropriate text selection for reading fluency and comprehension purposes as well as discusses the type of questions professionals can create based on text content in order to perform a deep assessment of reading comprehension abilities.

Learning Objectives:

• At the end of this presentation learners will be able to:

1. Conduct thorough grade-level assessments of reading fluency and comprehension of elementary aged and adolescent aged students
2. Appropriately select text complexity based on the students’ grades
3. Calculate reading fluency rates based on the latest reading fluency data (Hasbrouck and Tindal, 2017 ORF Measures)
4. Analyze reading fluency error types for intervention purposes
5. Determine the students’ reading comprehension error types for intervention purposes

Slide Content:

• Reading Stages
• Reading Fluency
• Reading and Cognition: Memory
• Reading and Cognition: Attention
• Reading and Cognition: Processing Speed
• Fluent Readers (NAEP)
• Calculating Oral Reading Fluency (ORF)
• The Role of Reading Prosody in Reading Comprehension
• Reading Prosody Checklist
• Text Selection
• Text Complexity
• Analyzing Error Types: Word Level
• Reading Fluency Case Studies
• Reading Comprehension Skills
• Impact of Oral Language on Reading Comprehension
• Types of Oral Language Deficits
• The Role of Pragmatics in Reading Comprehension
• Effect of Impaired Pragmatics on Reading Comprehension
• The Role of Inference Making in Reading Comprehension
• Background Knowledge and Reading Comprehension
• Gestalt Processing and Reading Comprehension
• Clinical Assessment of Reading Comprehension
  • Types of Questions
  • Hierarchy of Question Complexity
  • Reading Comprehension Sample Questions and Answers: Part I
  • Reading Comprehension Sample Questions and Answers: Part II
  • Creating Targeted Goals for Intervention Purposes
  • Conclusion
  • References