Informal Reading Inventory (IRI)

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) assessments can be given to students from kindergarten to high school age and hark back to a pre-No Child Left Behind standardized methodology for measuring student competencies. IRIs are intended to assist teachers in conducting day-to-day class work. The multi-sectioned test allows for one-on-one work between a student and an instructor; the student is asked to work through a variety of different-styled reading exercises designed to measure, among other competencies, vocabulary level, word recognition, pronunciation skills, reading proficiency, sentence design command, and general reading comprehension.

Overview

A well-documented downward spiral in reading competencies and reading skills among American primary grade students followed the ascendance of television in the 1950s and then digital technologies. Educators have worked to devise testing systems that could provide as specific a measure of the problem as possible and also to guide specific protocols for improving reading skills. Confidence in vocabulary, ability to recognize how words work together to move information, and competency to read with high efficiency materials that, as students move through their education, become more complex are all critical not only to academic success but also to professional success after school.

The actual theoretical assumptions behind the IRI program date back to the 1920s and the graduate work in teaching theory conducted by Emmett A. Betts. Betts authored a highly successful series of children’s books popularized in the 1950s in which, as the child moved through the series, the vocabulary used grew increasingly more challenging. He conducted more than a decade of studies while on the Education Department faculty at Pennsylvania State University. Those studies worked to correlate the relationship between vocabulary competence, sentence deign recognition, and classroom success, a groundbreaking theory in education that sought to triangulate teacher, student, and parents.

Betts first theorized that skills inventory should consider these five areas: (1) word recognition, (2) sentence construction, (3) the ability to maintain effective silent reading, (4) the ability to read aloud carefully and competently, and (5) the ability to use context clues within a sentence to determine unfamiliar words. Betts argued that reading is itself an endeavor that involves numerous processes which occur simultaneously and that even accomplished readers often do not recognize how much is involved in understanding a simple sentence. Being able to decode, from basic phonics to sentence construction, fluidly is essential to competent reading (Russell, 2013).

Although the criteria have changed over the years, Betts’s basic belief in one-on-one review between a student and a teacher has helped shape the testing program. The same is true for his theoretical belief in using metrics that evaluate all aspects of reading except the more abstract skills (explaining, for instance, motivation or developing an object in a text into a symbol or predicting likely next steps for fictional characters in the text).

As of 2017, school districts across the United States wishing to use the IRI approach can choose from more than a dozen highly regarded versions of the basic test format. It is difficult to determine how widespread the use of IRIs are, as school systems can use the same boxed system year to year and can even devise their own systems, particularly in schools with highly individual enrollments and school systems that provide services to students with a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. Unlike standardized tests, these measures can actually be tailored to a specific school system and can evaluate the reading skills of each class as it moves through the system’s programs.

It is important, therefore, to distinguish standardized tests from IRIs. Standardized tests measure the achievement of a student in a particular academic area. The IRI is far more domestic and far more practical. The results are directed back to the school itself—the student is considered a work in progress, and the results can help determine how the student uses class time, whether he or she would benefit from group work or extra instruction, or whether outside reading could help. In other words, IRI is diagnostic and helps identify strengths and weaknesses in a student’s reading competency while that education is ongoing.

Applications

At its most basic, the IRI can be used to determine a child’s reading level at any point along the education continuum from kindergarten to high school graduation. The tests, given periodically across those years, help teachers within the school system track the evolution of every child’s reading skills. The idea is to allow the test to show what often is not revealed in classroom endeavors: individual students who fall behind the standard and begin to lose ground in reading.

Administration. Such classroom-specific evaluations can recommend more appropriate reading materials, can better pace the class work for the year and, as Provost et al. argued in 2010, can even design particular instructional activities (many of which draw on computer games) to target the problems revealed in the test. Even opponents of the testing program acknowledge that a version of it can be very useful in helping to measure reading skills of first-generation immigrant schoolchildren who are learning English as a second language, because the nature of the test is intrinsically individual in its assessment and generally non-threatening in its presentation (Gandy, 2013).

Because the student never receives a particular score, the testing is considered informal—indeed, students work with faculty or aides whom they are in class with every day. In theory, this goes a long way in relieving the sort of test anxiety that often impacts scores on more formally conducted standardized tests. The atmosphere can be more relaxed, and the student and teacher can actually talk to clarify elements of the test or adjust the speed at which the test is being administered (Holbein & Harkins, 2010). The teacher evaluates the student’s performance during the testing and compiles a specific response to the student’s skills later.

Results. The test results, while not grades or scores, help the teachers adjust their class presentation and materials to benefit these students and to aid in addressing any perceived weakness in those areas of reading skills. Unlike standardized testing, IRI testing begins with the student completing an Attitude/Emotion form that asks about how they are feeling that day and about any problems they might be experiencing in school or even at home. Indeed, because the test involves reading passages, consideration is given to avoiding topics that might be of particular stress, for instance if a student has recently lost a pet, a passage about animals can be substituted for a passage about flowers.

Components. Because there are more than a dozen reputable textbook publishers which promote their own packet of IRI materials and because IRIs are routinely given within a school district from kindergarten to twelfth grade, individual schools can conduct the test in a variety of ways. Because of this, generalizing about the test itself is naturally difficult. But generally the testing has four components: vocabulary recognition and pronunciation, short sentence structure recognition, silent reading of a passage for comprehension, and listening to a passage for comprehension.

The student begins at a table with the teacher and a simple clipboard or computer screen with a list of words. The student is asked to read each word—the teacher listening for placement of accents, ignoring silent letters, recognizing vowel or consonant blends, mistaking one word for another, or having to sound out the word. The student moves through lists of twenty until he or she makes four mistakes in one list—considered the threshold of frustration. In the next part, the student is given a series of short sentences designed to test whether that student can see how the basic parts of a sentence work together to complete the transmission of an idea. “The expensive show dog was lost for two whole days,” for example, is a sentence that moves a lot of information through the cooperation of five different parts of speech. Students are tested on inflexion and pauses, as well as whether they drop words or change words or fail to drop their pitch to indicate the sentence has ended.

Then the student is asked to read silently a short passage (the longest passages are 250 words in high school tests). The passages are nonfiction and mostly from history, the broad sciences, or social studies. Immediately after, the instructor then asks 10 questions, made up of two types: informational (who, what, when, where) and inferential (why). The student is credited not only for getting a correct answer but for answering a question unassisted by having to return to the text to double-check the answer.

Finally, the student is asked to read aloud a brief passage. The teacher, with the same passage at hand, evaluates whether the sentences are maintained, whether words are changed or dropped or mispronounced, and whether the student takes drawn out pauses or reads too fast and blurs words. The student is also observed as to whether appropriate inflection is given to critical idea and whether the student acknowledges the impact of a question mark or an exclamation point in the reading. For the teacher, the performance is more than getting the words right—does the student show competency with word usage, a sense of how words work together, and how sentences move one into another? Does the student show marked fatigue as a passage goes on? Does a student interrupt the reading to ask questions or to chat?

Throughout the test—most tests take less than half an hour—the teacher or aide keeps a running checklist of observations about the student’s performance that after the test will be turned into a more complete response to the student’s performance. The evaluation will be used to adjust the presentation of materials to that student during class time. If individual instruction is required, such accommodations can be made. Perhaps most important, these scores can be measured against test scores taken by the same student under similar circumstances later in that school year or in the following year, creating an ongoing narrative of the student’s reading skills and competencies.

Viewpoints

In an era in which teaching effectiveness and student achievement are subjected to a barrage of testing services, IRI assessments can seem anachronistic, a throwback to an era when education was defined primarily by the dynamic between students and teacher. As Cramer and Christ pointed out in 2010, the IRI, as a qualitative test, derives much of its data from a relatively narrow performance, and even that one relies on the observations and notations of a single professional. And because any individual assessment relies almost entirely on a single passage chosen by the instructor, students who move through this system are never prepared for the difficult realities of standardized tests later in their education. Thus, since the rise of high stakes standardized testing, the results of IRIs have been challenged for their reliability (Nilsson, 2013).

Advocates of the testing format argue, however, that the results of the testing are limited in their interpretation, indeed specific to that student and to that reading class. The results of an IRI test, unlike standardized tests whose data is to be used as a basis for statewide, even national comparisons, is meant entirely for in-house uses: how that particular class, that particular teacher can address issues raised by the performance in the test. Critics object to the test-taking atmosphere itself. Unlike standardized testing facilities where the students are proctored most often by adults they do not know, thus creating a very formal and professional test setting, the IRIs are most often given in the home school in a familiar setting with a teacher already known to the student.

Recordings of the tests being delivered often reveal students getting restless and attempting to chat with the teacher or trying to leave the test site entirely because they are on familiar ground. And because the students (and their families) are repeatedly reassured that these tests are not evaluated with the same level of gravity as state tests or national standardized tests, maintaining a level of dedication is difficult. Many students, particularly as they advance through the school, too easily dismiss this test because it appears to lack clout or real impact on their future.

Of course, such criticism misses entirely the point of Betts’s initial research—long before the era of testing across the nation, Betts asked how a particular teacher in a particular classroom can work to improve a student’s reading competency and, specifically, what contribution can that teacher make to ensure the student’s long-term improvement? The aim of the IRI is to encourage a child to build a vocabulary, to create confident strategies for approaching unfamiliar words, to practice correct pronunciation and inflection, and to engage sentences as they work together to move information (as in textbooks), to explain complex issues (as in newspapers), or simply to share a story (as in literature).

Because there is no score to the IRI and because school systems do not use the results to create special classes for students who struggle, the intention behind the test was to create a community of readers who are, if not like-talented, are like-minded and can together, in groups that do not reflect the scoring ranges on the test, work together to improve reading levels for the entire class. The intention of the test was, and still is, simple, as Manzo and Manzo concluded in 2013: gathering data from the students themselves in a non-threatening testing environment helps assign a particular student to an instructional level that will be most likely to improve reading comprehension skills and competencies.

Terms & Concepts

Diagnostic Testing: A cumulative test, most often with little or no accountability, that is used to measure specific skills or competencies in a student before the beginning of a semester or yearlong class designed to improve those skills.

Frustration: The lowest score: It terminates the test—allowed in Informal Reading Inventory tests, most often when a student has missed four in a set of 20 vocabulary or sentence questions.

Inventory Sheet: The specific behavioral and competencies being observed by an instructor administering an Informal Reading Inventory test, used later as the basis for a fuller analysis of the student’s performance.

No Child Left Behind Act: Federal legislation signed into law in 2002 that involved the federal government in creating incentives for public schools by tying score improvements to federal funding.

Qualitative Testing: Testing that looks narrowly for the presence or absence of a particular trait, skill, or competency.

Reading Comprehension: A test package, most often using 100-500 word passages of nonfiction, which a student reads and then demonstrates his or her understanding of its argument by answering specific questions about what happened and inferential questions about why events happened.

Reliability: The measure, used by statisticians, as a way to gauge the usefulness of a test by using factors such as question variety, range of difficulty, testing environment, test preparation, and question wording.

Standardized Test: A test designed so that all test takers take exactly the same test based on questions taken from a common source and that the test, in turn, is scored in exactly the same way, most often through computers, to ensure results that can be compared.

Bibliography

Applegate, M. (2007). Using the critical reading inventory to guide differentiated instruction. College Reading Association Yearbook, (28), 213–224. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=26328909&site=ehost-live

Cramer, R., & Christ, T. (2010). Assessing comprehension through IRI: Its difficulties and its complexities. Michigan Reading Journal, 42(3), 29–39. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=54426951&site=ehost-live

Gandy, S. (2013). Informal reading inventories and ELL students. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 29(3), 271–287. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=88070528&site=ehost-live

Holbein, M., & Harkins, D. (2010). An investigation of teacher talk during the administration of an informal reading inventory. College Reading Association Yearbook, (31), 237–249. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=51535638&site=ehost-live

Manzo, U., & Manzo, A. (2013). The informal reading-thinking inventory: Twenty-first-century assessment formats for discovering reading and writing needs—and strengths. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 29(3), 231–251. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=88070529&site=ehost-live

Nilsson, N. (2013). The reliability of informal reading inventories: What has changed? Reading & Writing Quarterly, 29(3), 208-230. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=88070525&site=ehost-live

Provost, M. C., Lambert, M. A., & Babkie, A. M. (2010). Informal reading inventories: Creating teacher-designed literature-based assessments. Intervention in School & Clinic, 45(4), 211–220. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=48535445&site=ehost-live

Russell. C. (2013). Four decades of informal reading inventories. Review of Higher Education & Self-Learning, 6(22), 1–21. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=94256133&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Ascenzi-Moreno, L. (2016). An exploration of elementary teachers’ views of informal reading inventories in dual language bilingual programs. Literacy Research & Instruction, 55(4), 285–308. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=118890342&site=ehost-live

Burns, M. B., Pulles, S. M., Maki, K. E., Kanive, R., Hodgson, J., Helman, L. A., & ... Preast, J. L. (2015). Accuracy of student performance while reading leveled books rated at their instructional level by a reading inventory. Journal of School Psychology, 53(6), 437–445. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=110855908&site=ehost-live

Koretz, D. (2006). Measuring up: What educational testing really tells us. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Roe, B., & Burns, P. (2010). Informal reading inventory: Preprimer to twelfth grade. Boston, MA: Cengage.

Trezek, B. J., & Mayer, C. (2015). Using an informal reading inventory to differentiate instruction: Case studies of three deaf learners. American Annals of the Deaf, 160(3), 288–302. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=110258480&site=ehost-live

Wheelock, W., et al. (2011). Classroom reading inventory. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.