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Phone: (480) 991-6560 |
Scottsdale Office: 6865 E. Becker Ln. Ste 101 Scottsdale, AZ 85254 |
Chandler Office: 932 W. Chandler Blvd. Ste 3 Chandler, AZ 85225 |
Reading Evaluation
| For the school aged child, reading and writing skills are directly related to language! Children take information in through listening and reading. They share information through speaking and writing. Does your child have difficulty sounding out words when he or she is reading? Does your child have trouble understanding what he or she has just read? Does your child have trouble identifying the main idea or remembering details from something just read? A reading evaluation may help pinpoint the problem. Reading evaluations focus on the child's ability to accurately "decode" or sound out words, read irregular spelling patterns, read fluently, and comprehend what they have read. Any description of a child's reading ability must include consideration of the efficiency and accuracy of decoding. Word analysis skills, which form the initial foundation for sophisticated reading, need to be evaluated during oral reading. To assess these skills, observations are made about the ease and accuracy with which children decipher the phonology of an unfamiliar word. A number of specific questions should be asked when evaluating a child's word analysis skills. First, how effectively is the child focusing on the details of the word? Second, are there certain letters or letter combinations that have not been mastered? Third, are there problems blending the sounds in the right sequence to form words? Fourth, what is the rate and efficiency of the word analysis? Both silent and oral reading abilities should be evaluated. All children need to read well to succeed in school and without adequate decoding skills children will struggle throughout school. An evaluation of reading comprehension is a complex undertaking. First of all, comprehension requirements change drastically as children age and reach the more advanced grades so that increasingly sophisticated measures must be employed. Second, comprehension is impacted by so many variables that it is difficult to measure each in a relatively pure form. Attention, memory, language ability, factual knowledge, organizational skill, higher cognition, and adequacy of decoding all influence understanding. Reading comprehension is generally tested by having children read a paragraph and then answer questions. The accuracy of responses is taken as an indication of competency. The questions may relate to specific vocabulary in the passage, structure, literal meaning, main ideas and supporting details, authors point of view and stylistic techniques. The goal is to identify the reason for the child's challenges in understanding what they have read, so that they do not have to re-read to gain meaning from what they have decoded. Call the PSLS office if you would like to schedule this evaluation at (480) 991-6560. |
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