Struggling to pinpoint where your students’ reading challenges lie? Without accurate insights, providing effective support can feel like a stab in the dark.
Generic tests and standardized solutions can often miss the mark, leaving important issues unaddressed and students falling further behind. In this article, you’ll discover the power of targeted diagnostic assessments that can identify specific reading struggles, enabling you to implement tailored interventions. Read on to equip yourself with the right tools to help every student succeed, one assessment at a time.
Diagnostic assessments can be used to evaluate reading abilities in a targeted way, identifying areas where a student may be struggling—or excelling—so that tailored instruction can be provided.
Assessments focus on various components of reading, including
The key difference between diagnostic assessments and other types of assessment is their focus on diagnosis—they highlight areas for improvement, rather than simply measuring performance.
Teachers should use both formal and informal assessments to understand students’ reading abilities. This helps you collect quantitative and qualitative data to better support student needs and guide your interventions.
These standardized assessments are structured to provide reading proficiency data. They’re typically used to determine whether a student needs additional support while tracking progress over time.
Assessments include:
More flexible than formal assessments, these allow insight into student reading behaviors and understanding in real time and can be tailored to individual student needs.
Assessment examples include:
Derived from Response to Intervention (RTI)—a method for identifying and supporting struggling students early on—and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) framework provides different levels of help to students.
The framework aims to address academic, behavioral, and social-emotional needs, ensuring all students receive the support they need with early identification, proactive interventions, and ongoing monitoring.
All students are assessed around 3 times a year to ensure early identification of those at risk academically or behaviorally and needing additional support.
This support system is split into 3 tiers:
Diagnostic reading assessments are crucial in MTSS as they help to guide tier placement. They also track progress so adjustments to interventions can be made as necessary.
Student progress is tracked consistently to ensure interventions are effective. If a student isn’t improving, adjustments are made.
Data from assessments is used to guide decisions about student needs, the level of intervention required, and instructional strategies.
Teachers, administrators, and specialists work together to analyze data, share strategies, and ensure consistent support for students across different settings. By engaging families in the process, students can receive consistent support both at school and at home.
Each of the following assessments can play a crucial role in measuring reading skills.
Used for all students, universal screening helps to identify students with reading difficulties to determine when intervention is required.
Common assessments include Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)—which measures phonemic awareness, fluency, and comprehension—and the Formative Assessment System for Teachers (FAST), which identifies students’ literacy needs to guide instructional decisions.
These help identify reading challenges by providing insights into students’ strengths and weaknesses. Tools such as i-Ready help measure reading progress and provide future intervention paths, while the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading (DAR) assesses achievement in 9 components of language.
The Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System can also be used for measuring reading comprehension, fluency, and word recognition through leveled texts.
Usually given every 1-4 weeks, these assessments help to track reading progress over time, ensuring interventions are effective and adjustments are made when necessary. Assessments such as Acadience Reading Diagnostic monitor early literacy skills (phonemic awareness, fluency, and comprehension) to guide instruction.
Summative assessments such as standardized tests evaluate student performance at the end of a unit or academic period. For example, the Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT) provides insight into a student’s strengths and weaknesses, showing how the student approaches reading tasks and highlighting areas for improvement.
Adaptive testing platforms such as TAO Testing can help educators create and administer summative assessments. Question difficulty is adjusted based on a student’s previous answers, which helps to reduce frustration in both advanced and struggling students. It also provides the teacher with a more accurate depiction of students’ abilities.
These are ongoing informal evaluations used throughout the learning process to monitor student progress and provide immediate feedback. Assessments such as quizzes help teachers adjust instruction based on students’ needs, guiding learning in real time.
These tests gauge how well students comprehend what they’ve read. For example, teachers can use tools like Cathoven to create multiple-choice quizzes, where students answer questions after reading a short passage.
These tools measure students’ ability to understand sounds in words. For example, phoneme segmentation tests ask students to listen to words and identify individual sounds, while phonics screenings assess how well students decode words based on letter-sound relationships.
Word knowledge quizzes can measure how well students understand and use vocabulary in context, while vocabulary size tests can measure how many words a student knows and understands across different levels.
Diagnostic reading assessments help identify reading difficulties, allowing educators to tailor interventions to individual student needs. Using frameworks such as the MTSS, teachers can provide varying levels of support and address challenges early.
By combining a variety of assessment types and EdTech tools—such as TAO Testing—teachers can gain a comprehensive understanding of students’ reading abilities and provide targeted instruction to help every student succeed.
If you’re unsure of which assessment to choose, take a look at our teacher’s guide to choosing the right assessment tools, or check out the examples of diagnostic assessments in education on the TAO blog.
An Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) is a diagnostic tool where students read a graded passage aloud and answer questions that assess reading level, decoding, fluency, and comprehension.
The 4 types of reading assessments are diagnostic, formative, summative, and benchmark. They assess skills, track progress, measure achievement, and set performance goals.