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

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.

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.