The Purpose of Early Screening
It is important to understand the assumptions underlying the screens available for early reading assessment. Let's take the TPRI as an example. The TPRI came out of a legislative mandate to provide a diagnostic reading instrument for K-2 teachers in Texas. Given that the screen would be used with entire classrooms of children, we designed it to save the teacher time by identifying children who would most likely be at or above grade level on the Woodcock-Johnson Broad Reading at the end of the year so that she could spend more time giving the inventory to those students who would likely be behind half a year or more. In other words, we did not develop the screen to identify students at-risk; rather, we developed the screen to rapidly (i.e., in 3-5 minutes) and accurately identify those students not at-risk.
The students "still developing" concepts on the screen are deemed at risk only if they don't receive good instruction. Thus, the large percentage of kindergarteners deemed at risk in our validation study--56%, as Jenkins pointed out--is a signal to the teacher that she needs to instruct her students in fundamental reading concepts because they haven't developed literacy knowledge at home or in preschool. By administering the inventory to students at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, the teacher can assess the range of skills in reading domains identified in the state standards, establish instructional objectives for each child, and monitor learning across the year. We have developed more fluency probes so that teachers can monitor progress more frequently. Right now we are recommending 6 times a year in addition to the beginning, middle, and end of year fluency assessments--that is 9 times a year. Like the other reading selections on the TPRI, these fluency probes have comprehension questions attached and students are placed in a passage based on links between accuracy on a list and accuracy in the passage. We have developed a third grade TPRI in which story placement is based on timed decoding, rather than untimed decoding. Both timed and untimed decoding predict to reading accuracy and comprehension in our passages. Neither predicts better than the other.
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