IRI
Impact of qualitative reading inventories and subsequent educational intervention plans have on literacy development in elementary students
Impact of qualitative reading inventories and subsequent educational intervention plans on literacy development in elementary students
Reading inventories are frequently used both to assess students who are struggling and to identify strategies that are helpful in supporting reading success for the larger student body. "Procedurally, [informal reading inventories] IRIs assess a student's instructional level in reading using sets of passages that are written or selected to be representative of the difficulty level of texts at different grade levels, and in different schools and reading programs" (Specter 2005: 595). "By charting and analyzing patterns in oral reading error types, educators identify whether students rely on one cueing system & #8230; to the exclusion of the others, as beginning readers typically do, or if they use a balance of strategies, as mature readers at more advanced stages" (Nilsson 2008: 526).
For example, in one study of 2nd-grade children who received daily supplemental reading instruction vs. those who did not, children who received the additional academic...
Yet, authors found no significant differences between the 1st-grade students in the 2 groups on phonics measure" (McIntyre et al. 2005). On qualitative, non-data driven measures of achievement, the students who received the additional instruction showed improvement; but their technical grasp of the mechanics of phonics was still lacking.
The authors concluded that "despite excellent instruction, some children need more time with their teacher and time in small-group settings rather than whole-class instruction" (McIntyre et al. 2005). The student's poor performance on phonics, despite their success at more qualitative measures of reading success was not entirely unsurprising given that "findings overall illustrated that students whose programs focused on phonics did better on those measures than did students in programs that did not have that focus" and no systematic use of phonics was included in the assessment (McIntyre et al. 2005).
However, other researchers have suggested that the use of qualitative reading inventories to measure program success is inherently faulty, hence the marked unreliability…
