Understanding, Assessing, and Teaching Reading: A Diagnostic Approach, 8th edition

For courses in reading assessment, diagnosis and remediation.

A combination of theory, practical applications and basic skills that emphasizes how to make reading assessment and instruction decisions

Understanding, Assessing and Teaching Reading is a comprehensive, practical text that helps teachers gather assessment data in order to make teaching decisions. In addition to fostering understanding of the reading assessment process, this text presents a wide variety of reading skills, strategies and teaching techniques that are appropriate follow-ups to assessments.

The 8th edition offers a dedicated chapter on assessing and teaching writing, plus updated children's literature recommendations.

Hallmark features of this title

• The text makes diagnostic assessment accessible. The authors consider the various assessment measures teachers can use to assess and diagnose students' reading performance, and evaluate each test's strengths and weaknesses. Readers learn how to:
  • Select, administer and score each measure, and interpret the results.
  • Use the information from the assessments to design appropriate instruction.
  • Choose the most appropriate assessment techniques using 3 guiding questions: what do I want to know, why do I want to know that, and how can I best discover this information?
• From Assessment to Instruction sections provide specific ideas on how to move back and forth between these 2 important principles of teaching.

New and updated features of this title

• NEW: An entirely new chapter on writing (Chapter 13) highlights the importance of writing in literacy growth, and how many students' strengths and needs in writing relate to their growth as readers.
• UPDATED: The text presents the most up-to-date information on diagnostic assessment, reading engagement, teaching with texts, phonics, the role of teachers and more. The updated research base includes 110 research articles and chapters published since the last edition, with dozens of updated references.
• UPDATED: Updated children's literature references throughout the text include many recent books that will better match what teachers will find in public and school libraries. A special focus on updated children's literature characterizes Chapter 7.
• UPDATED: A Reading Inventory in Appendix A enables full implementation of the IRI presented in Chapter 4. This edition streamlines the IRI process of scoring and interpretation to match the text's diagnostic approach.
• NEW: Bridge features demonstrate how teachers make decisions to transition from understanding reading to assessing readers; from assessing readers to teaching them; and how teaching leads to further understanding. Bridges are found in several locations in each chapter between the Understanding, Assessing, and Teaching subheadings.