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Over the past few decades, reading assessment has been pushed to the forefront of the national discussion about education. The most recent reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1994, 2001) made assessment a priority as administrators and teachers are attempting to meet increasing accountability standards, but measuring reading ability is a difficult task (Anderson, 1972; Duke, 2005; Pearson & Hamm, 2005; Sweet, 2005). Part of the difficulty lies in the complexity of the reading process itself. Reading is most often viewed as a multidimensional construct, as suggested by models of reading that focus on different levels of understanding (Davis, 1944, 1968; Kintsch, 2004; Perfetti, 2007). Moreover, reading is a complex process that changes depending on the type of text, purpose for reading, and reading topic (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Pressley, 2000; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). The complexity of the reading process makes it challenging to assess exactly what is happening when readers read and understand text.
Part of this challenge could be that research into the assessment and treatment of reading difficulties has developed a focus on maximizing intervention effects. Though ensuring that reading interventions have the strongest impact on student performance, the focus on performance has arguably migrated the field away from interventions that are based on reading theory (Compton, Miller, Elleman, & Steacy, 2014). In fact, reading assessment may have been developed to maximize differentiation of students over theory (Suchey, 2009). Both theory and student performance are important foci, but maximum effect sizes in intervention research and maximum differentiation in assessment research could driftto align more closely over time as intervention research uses the tests designed to differentiate. This could potentially narrow the functioning construct of reading in assessment and intervention to become unidimensional, which could lead to ignoring important aspects of reading that are more difficult to measure or change through intervention. In this article, we provide an overview of the need for and purpose of reading assessment, summarize each of the articles in the special series, and explore the need for assessment and intervention that is aligned with specific components of reading, as well as general reading ability.
Developing Appropriate Reading Assessments
Because reading is a complex process to assess, it is difficult to develop measures that result...