Informal Reading Inventory

An Informal Reading Inventory is a great tool for teachers to use with their students to assess multiple concepts. One purpose of the IRI is to monitor the growth of a student’s word recognition, oral reading, and comprehension to determine the reading level of independent, instructional, and frustration. The frustration level is when the passage is too hard for the student even with help from the teacher. Instructional reading level is when a student can read the text with the assistance from a teacher, parent, or peer. Independent means that the student can read the passage alone with no outside help. When teachers administer these tests they can pick the level of the passage given and use the results to help decide how to further instruct

Then the student will read the passage orally with no help from the teacher, the student is advised before reading to try to sound out words or move on from the word. As the student reads the teacher counts all of the miscues the student had. Miscues consist of omission of words or phrases, reversal of words, self-correction, insertion of words into the text, and substitution of words. Teachers can take the miscue words and evaluate them for the meaning, visual, and syntactic comparison of the printed word. After, the student has read the passage they answer questions about what they have read. These inventories are great information for the teachers it tells the teacher that the students can read a passage, but cannot understand it, or the student could read the passage and understand it but needs to work on word recognition and phonics more. The Qualitative Reading Inventory is the IRI tested on two first graders in a field

The student who reads Spring and Fall answered all of the conceptual questions to the best of her ability. Most of the answers were correct and made sense coming from a first grader. Once she started to read, the student read slowly and sounded out most of the words but read them correctly. She self-corrected herself three times while reading, confusing words like go and do, skipping lines, but going back to read it once it did not make sense. When she came across the word cook after reading the word book she became stumped and frustrated. I gave her some time to look at the word and encouraged her to sound it out to figure out what it says. After giving her a minute to look at the word I told her to skip it and move on reading. Next, she read the passage the score she received was instructional; therefore, asking her questions about what she read was the next step. When asking her the questions, she could not remember any of the questions that involved information from before the word cook. She answered both of the questions correctly that related to the text after the word cook. Her word recognition score was instructional, but her comprehension was frustration, for that reason her overall score is frustration