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Assessment is as old as instruction. Speaking of reading comprehension assessment, Pearson and Hamm comment, "Although reading comprehension assessment as a formal identifiable activity is a 20th century phenomenon, it has been part of classrooms for as long as there have been schools, required texts, students who are required to read them, and teachers wanting to know whether students understood them" (p. 145).

The scientific measurement of reading began to appear in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1909, Edward Lee Thorndike of Teachers College, Columbia University, introduced a handwriting scale, which was published the following year (Smith, 1967). The publication of his scale marked the introduction of scientific measurement in reading and writing. Other scales and assessments soon followed. The Gray Standard Oral Reading Paragraphs was published in 1915. A much revised version, the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT) is still in use. Still, as Smith (1965) notes, "Reading was the last of the tools subjects to yield itself to the testing movement." One reason for the delay was that oral reading predominated and didn't lend itself to standardized assessment. Nevertheless, between 1915 and 1918, four standardized tests of silent reading were published. For the most part, the tests measured speed of reading and comprehension. The appearance of silent reading tests fostered the practice of silent reading in the schools, proving once again that what gets tested gets taught. Ironically, those early tests used retelling scores as a measure of comprehension.

Meanwhile, intelligence testing was having an impact on education. In his preface to Terman's description of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, the first individual intelligence test created in the United States, Cubberly (1916) commented that:

The educational significance of the results to be obtained from careful measurement of the intelligence of children can hardly be overestimated. Questions relating to the choice of studies, vocational guidance, schoolroom procedures, the grading of pupils, promotional schemes, the study of the retardation of children in the schools, juvenile delinquency, and the proper handling of subnormals on one hand and gifted children on the other,-all alike acquire new meaning and significance when viewed in the light of the measurement of intelligence. .... (pp. vii to viii)

Citing statistics that indicated between a third and a half of school children repeated one or more grades, Terman (1916) proposed that the solution was to measure students' mental ability and then base instruction on that ability. "The remedy, of course, is to measure out the work for each child in proportion to his mental ability" (p. 4). Terman's remedy was based on the assumption that intelligence was fixed and not impacted by the environment and that the Stanford-Binet would reveal the child's "true Intelligence." Both of these assumptions have been proved to be false. Research over the years has demonstrated that intelligence is a difficult concept to define, and, consequently, to measure and that is affected by the environment. However, the Stanford-Binet and a number of group intelligence tests that came after it were used widely and played an important role in educational decisions. The discrepancy definition of a learning disability has its roots in Terman's belief that a test of mental ability provided a criterion for the level of work a student should be able to do.

In the 1930s, technology had a dramatic impact on the format of tests. IBM introduced a system of machine scoring. With the introduction of machine scoring, multiple choice items and scorable answer sheets became widespread. There was an increase in the use of group reading and group intelligence tests.

In 1953, Wilson Taylor created the cloze procedure. The advantage of cloze was that it would measure comprehension without the interference of comprehension questions, which could be tricky or subjective. Cloze was popular for a time but is apparently rarely used in its classical form. It is now mostly used in an adapted form in which the reader selects from three to five options. This, of course, changes the nature of the task from one of prediction to one of selection. Modified cloze is used in several currently published tests, including the Degrees of Reading Power, Scholastic Inventory, and STAR. It is also used in mazes, a curriculum based measure in which readers complete as many items as they can in two and a half or three minutes.

Question 1. What are the different assessment tools are you familiar with?

Question 2. Do you think as a reading specialist the use of intelligent tests should be administered? Why or why not?

Question 3. Which are the best practices assessment tools based on those analyze above?

Question 4. What are some informal measures that might be used to assess literacy development?

Question 5. As a teacher do you honestly think portfolios are valuable?

Question 6. Do you presently have portfolios in your classrooms? Should the idea of portfolios be discouraged or encouraged and why