Informal Reading Inventory

Kelsey Wallace

When it came to word recognition in isolation, the student (whom I will refer to here as
Joey for confidentiality purposes) was very successful. I had to repeatedly ask Joey to slow
down or pause just so that I could keep up with recording whether he correctly identified the
word automatically or not. The fact that he could move through the lists faster than I could put
a check mark beside each word reflects what a high level of automaticity he has. Joey didn’t
begin to slow down until the upper middle school list. Joey is in 4 th grade, and was able to
identify 20/20 words automatically on the fifth and sixth grade lists as well. Once he reached
the upper middle school list he began to slow down but was still able to automatically identify
17/20 words and identified 1 more word not automatically, meaning that in total he correctly
identified 18/20 upper middle school words. The words he missed were “persecution” and
“riffling”. His attempts at these words were close, but he seemed to give up and said he did not
know those words. Once reaching the high school list, Joey reached his frustration level. He was
able to automatically identify 8/20 words. One thing I noticed that Joey could improve on is his
endurance when he is not able to automatically identify words. Out of all of the word lists, pre-
primer through high school, he identified only 4 words that were not automatic. When Joey did
not automatically identify a word, he seemed to kind of give up on words that I feel he could
have sounded out or figured out if he had given it a better try. It almost appeared as if he was
anxious to just move on to the next word rather than taking the time to decipher the words he
didn’t recognize automatically.
Joey’s oral reading accuracy was also very successful. He was again reading so quickly
that I could barely keep up with my running record. He began by reading the upper middle
school passage titled “Biddy Mason”. In this passage, Joey made a total of five miscues. Out of
750 words, this seems very minimal for a fourth-grade students reading an upper middle school
passage. Joey’s miscues included reading “planned” as “plan”, repeatedly attempting the word
“San Bernardino” different ways, and omitting the word “have”. These seem to be mistakes
that anyone could make while reading a text that is at their reading level. The fact that he
struggled with San Bernardino is an example of a time that I feel he could have sounded out a
word, but he instead sort of stumbled over the word while moving forward. I also don’t think
that a proper noun that he has likely never heard of is a very good representative of his reading
ability. On the high school passage, Joey had a similar performance, with 6 errors out of 707
words. These errors were on words such as “suite” and “vestibule”. When reading the high
school level text, Joey did not seem to be at his frustration level, though when he did reach the
word “vestibule”, he would say that he didn’t know the word and move on. Again, I think what
Joey needs to improve upon in this category is his perseverance to decipher words that he
doesn’t recognize automatically, rather than saying he doesn’t know that word and skipping it.
Comprehension was a more difficult area for Joey. He was able to successfully recall
some of the more repetitive details or scenes that were more focused upon or heavily detailed.
HE also seemed to do a good job of remembering opening scenes. On the Upper middle school
passage, Joey scored a 7/12 on the concept questions, prior to the reading. After reading, he
was able to recall only 6/64 ideas which were listed and he accurately answered 1 out of the 5
comprehension questions. He seemed to recall somewhat random details in an attempt to
answer the comprehension questions. I think this may be because he is used to having answers
verbatim in front of him in class, and doesn’t have much experience with inference and having
to process the ideas himself to find the overarching ideas and more big picture aspects of the
passage. Some evidence for this theory is that he would answer the comprehension questions
with somewhat direct phrases, which did not make a ton of sense and the answer to these
questions. On the high school passage, he had a very similar comprehension level. Joey got
0/15 of the pre-reading concept questions correctly, identified 8 of the 45 ideas in his retelling,
and 1 of the 10 comprehension questions correctly. In the passage, it seemed that his confusion
about the setting of the Vietnam war contributed heavily to his ability to comprehend the story.
He recalled some of the details of people being awoken in the night by gunshots, but he
couldn’t put together that they were in the setting of the Vietnam war and what they were
trying to escape.
In the category of fluency, joey was on grade level leaning towards a fifth-grade level.
Considering that he was reading upper middle school and high school passages, I feel that his
fluency is very well developed. In the upper middle school passage, Joey read 141 words per
minute, which falls in the fifth-grade fluency range (140-180 wpm). On the high school level
passage, Joey read 126.6 words per minute, which falls into the fourth-grade fluency level (120-
160 wpm). This reflects that Joeys reading fluency is mostly within the fourth-grade level, but
given that he performed at this fluency level on upper middle school and high school level
passages, Joey’s fluency seems to be developing at an above average rate. If Joey had taken
more time to determine words he did not recognize automatically, his rate would have slowed
down slightly, but his errors were so few that it would not have been enough to change grade
level ranges. In conducting this IRI, I did not find anything specific that Joey needed to work on
for his fluency.
In reflecting on giving this IR, I do feel that this was a valuable experience as a pre-
service teacher. Actually going through all the steps with the student was a good exercise in
administering these types of reading inventories and how to interpret the results. I was very
surprised to see how well the student that I worked with was able to perform in the word
recognition in isolation, oral reading accuracy, and fluency categories, while struggling so much
with the comprehension of the passages. If I was his teacher, I would surely have more insight
into his comprehension and it would not have been such a shock to me, but it would still be
very valuable for identifying what specifically the student struggles to comprehend and what
strategies might help him to further develop these skills. When I discussed these results with
my CT after concluding the IRI, she said she knew that he would read very well but struggle with
comprehension. I am curious to know what sorts of activities and discussion have made that
clear to her, or if she has conducted anything similar to an IRI to help her pinpoint his areas for
growth.