Validating Craft Knowledge: An Empirical Examination of Elementary-Grade Students' Performance on an Informal Reading Assessment

This longitudinal study investigated children's performance on several informal reading and spelling tasks. Students (n= 274) in a rural North Carolina county were assessed across grades 2 to 6 on the following measures: isolated word recognition (timed and untimed), oral reading accuracy, reading comprehension, reading rate, and spelling. Statistics (means and standard deviations) were reported for each measure each year. Overall, the results tended to support traditional performance criteria in reading diagnosis. Two findings that deserve further study were (1) word recognition–timed proved to be a good predictor of oral reading rate at each grade level (medianr= .68), and (2) both oral and silent reading rates, after increasing steadily from grade 2 to 4, began to taper off between grades 4 and 6. This second finding is in contrast to previous reading-rate data reported by Hasbrouck and Tindal and by Taylor.