Assessment of Comprehension Skills in Older Struggling Readers

In this project, the researchers aimed to develop a new comprehensive, computerized language assessment battery, called the Comprehensive Assessment of Reading and Listening (CARL) test. CARL was organized according to psycholinguistic principles and used to assess the comprehension problems of older readers (students in grades 7 to 10). Informing this measure was the observation that older struggling readers fail to read well for variety of reasons including difficulties at the word, sentence, or discourse level. At the time of this project, assessment tests were limited in their ability to identify those causes sufficiently to identify which intervention(s) may best support the student. By the end of this project, researchers aimed to have validated a reliable computerized assessment test that educators could use to identify which comprehension skills students may need to build and to assess whether students are becoming more accurate and more automatic with the various subcomponents through instruction.