IRI Subtest Resources

Listening Comprehension

In this subtest, students are assessed on their ability to listen to, understand, and answer comprehension questions about short spoken stories. This is accomplished through picture selection. In this task, the narrator reads aloud a short story to the student with a picture related to the story, rather than text, present on the screen. The narrator then asks the student a question related to the story. The student chooses from four pictures the one that best answers the question.

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Mrs. Bear Sits on a Chair

Listening Comprehension Strategies

Phonemic Awareness

There are two types of items used to measure a student’s Phonemic Awareness:

In the first item type, four pictures appear on the screen at once. The narrator says the name of each picture as the box around it highlights. The student is asked to click on the picture that has the same beginning sound as the sound produced orally by the narrator.
In the second item type, four pictures appear on the screen with a box in the middle that contains an animated side view of a head. Then the narrator says the name of each picture as the box around it highlights. The narrator says one of the words by pronouncing each phoneme or syllable while the animated head demonstrates the specific sounds. The student is asked to click on the picture showing the word that has been spoken.

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Letter Knowledge

The objective of the Letter Knowledge subtest is for a student to identify the symbol for a letter’s name and sound. The student is presented with various capital and lowercase letters. Five letters appear on the screen for each item. The narrator asks the student to click on a particular letter or the letter that represents a sound orally produced by the narrator.

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Alphabetic Decoding

The objective of the Alphabetic Decoding subtest is for a student to correctly identify non-words that are pronounced by the narrator. The narrator pronounces a non-word and the student chooses from four items that appear on the screen. In this subtest, letters represent their most common sounds.

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Spelling

The objective of the Spelling subtest is to determine if a student is developing fully specified orthographic representations of words. For each item, an array of letters appears on the screen and the narrator asks the student to spell a specific word using those letters. The student then spells the word by clicking each letter. As each letter is selected, the word is formed on a line that appears directly above the letter array.

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Text Fluency

Text Fluency is constructed in a very different manner from the other subtests. Students are assessed on their ability to read text with meaning in a specified period of time. In order to assess text reading for understanding, a Maze task is used in which every fifth or eighth word of a grade-leveled story is left blank. For each blank, the student is given three choices from which to select the word that works best in the sentence. The student will spend two minutes reading the text and selecting correct responses. This task has been shown to correlate highly with measures of both fluency and comprehension.

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Vocabulary

There are two types of items used to measure a student’s Vocabulary knowledge and to evaluate both the upper and lower bounds of this knowledge:

In the first item type, four pictures appear on the screen. The student is asked to identify the picture that best illustrates a word pronounced by the narrator.
In the second item type, four words appear on the screen. Each of the four words is spoken by the narrator. The student is asked to identify which word has a meaning that is the same as or similar to a word pronounced by the narrator.

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Reading Comprehension

In this subtest, students are assessed on their ability to read and understand sentences and paragraphs. This is accomplished through matching sentences with pictures and sentence completion tasks.

Matching sentences with pictures assesses a student’s knowledge of semantic and syntactic information for which pictures can support reading. In this task, a sentence and four pictures appear on the screen. The student reads the sentence and identifies the picture that best illustrates the sentence meaning.
Sentence completion measures a student's ability to use word meanings and word order to understand a sentence. In this task, a sentence, sentences, or a paragraph appears on the screen. One word is missing from the text. The student reads the text and chooses from four words the one that best completes the text. Resources: