Teaching children to read is arguably every teacher’s most important responsibility.

If a child is still struggling with their reading skills in secondary school, the reality is that they have faced years of struggle already - and more issues lie ahead of them. This is the situation that too many young people find themselves in.

It’s no surprise, then, that reading is high on the agenda when it comes to school improvement priorities and government policy.

But reading is already a focus in secondary schools, and most schools already undertake standardised reading assessments that are meant to drive whole-school approaches, along with targeted interventions to support struggling readers.

So, if reading is already being taught and tested in secondary schools, what is going wrong?

Reading assessment: the challenges

Let’s take a real-world example of a struggling reader in secondary school: Jamie is a Year 8 student who has just turned 13. He has struggled to access the secondary curriculum. For example, sources in history or case studies in geography have proven tricky for him to read and understand.

Jamie happens to have a “reading age” of 10.2 years, based on his standardised reading age assessment at the start of the year. Teachers know Jamie’s reading-age data, but they know too little about what to do with it.

Reading ages are compelling because they offer a seemingly precise comparison between students. But the real picture is more complicated.

Reading-age assessments tend to focus on testing reading comprehension. But comprehension is a tricky, multifaceted thing. It is made up of a combination of sub-skills, such as decoding, vocabulary knowledge, fluency and the ability to make inferences using background knowledge. Therefore, testing it is not straightforward.

As a result, reading comprehension assessments can look quite different. They have different question types and often a different sub-skill emphasis.

Reliance on reading ages

In short, a test taken by a student in Year 8 may be different from the one their school bought in and used in the previous year. If Jamie sat several of the different standardised reading score tests that are popularly used in English secondary schools, he’d probably get some varied results.

There could easily be a reading age difference of six months between different tests. And, of course, each one would probably also suggest different solutions.

Not only that, a reading-age score of 10.2 years may not be the problem it appears to be. This makes it sound as though Jamie is lagging badly behind his peers, but as researchers like Professor Jessie Ricketts have found, a reading age of 10.2 years is within the average range of variation for Year 8 students.

Reliance on reading ages and little else can leave teachers confused and lacking the full picture of a student’s reading capabilities. They need more specific, targeted information to help students like Jamie thrive.

Moving beyond reading ages

This does not mean that standardised reading assessments are useless, but that teachers need to be supported to understand the nature of these assessments in order to interpret and use them successfully.

Data from these tests should be interpreted carefully and combined with diagnostic assessments that teachers can use more directly and more regularly, allowing them to adjust their teaching in real time.

As a bonus, diagnostic reading assessments can be undertaken freely in lessons and don’t require a large budget. They can also be meaningfully tied to the subject curriculum with relative ease. This helps history, English or French teachers, for example, to adapt their practice so that a student like Jamie can read successfully in more subjects across the curriculum.

Another benefit of manageable and diagnostic reading assessments is that they can help teachers target vital reading sub-skills and address them more precisely.

For example, the following diagnostic reading checks could be useful to teachers and supplement the information gleaned from a standardised reading age assessment.

Scenario one: Jamie lacks confidence to read aloud in English and drama. What can his teachers do?

Deliver a reading fluency assessment. Jamie can read aloud an age-appropriate text to a partner, and vice versa, while the teacher circulates the class and listens.

The teacher can use accessible fluency assessment tools, such as the Multidimensional Fluency Scale, and a “words per minute” (WPM) measurement. If Jamie sounds dysfluent - with a choppy rhythm and tripping over words - that is an indication that targeted fluency practice is needed.

Scenario two: Jamie is clearly finding it hard to follow the dense scientific language used in the textbook and worksheets in his biology lessons. What can his science teacher do?

Perform a diagnostic vocabulary assessment, such as the Dale vocabulary self-assessment, at the start of a biology topic. This allows you to explore the student’s depth of vocabulary knowledge, for words like photosynthesis, glucose, chlorophyll and more. It uses the following self-assessment scale:

1. I’ve never heard of this word before (one point)
2. I’ve seen or heard this word, but I don’t know what it means (two points)
3. I think I know what it means (three points)
4. I know what it means and can use it in a sentence (four points)

Teachers can probe the accuracy of the self-assessment and puncture overconfidence by asking students to explain their knowledge, or use the word in a sentence, if three or four is attributed to a word.

Scenario three: Jamie is finding it hard to answer questions about the sources being read in history. What can his history teacher do?

In this situation, an “oral retell” assessment can be useful. In a quick, individual assessment, the teacher should pose a clear initial prompt, based on the recent history reading. For example: “Tell me about the conditions for peasants that led to the Peasants’ Revolt.”

Using a pre-prepared checklist of assessment criteria (for example, that key events are clearly explained, claims are supported by evidence and key terms are understood), teachers can get an initial picture of Jamie’s understanding, while follow-up questions can then be used to probe his reading comprehension further.

‘Manageable diagnostic assessment’

Opportunities to make the most of these manageable diagnostic reading assessments are often missed because they are not deemed rigorous enough by school leaders. They can be looked upon unfavourably compared with the more “spreadsheet-friendly” reading ages.

But if we dismiss these kinds of teacher assessments, we may never understand what Jamie’s reading age of 10.2 years actually means in the reality of the classroom.

Alex Quigley is the author of Why Learning Fails (And What To Do About It)

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