This testing procedure is intended for use with students working at a Year 3-8 Level.
The assumption is that the students you are working with have undergone phonics instruction in the first two years of schooling, the essential foundation for skilled reading. In these first years, testing procedures will have focused on the student's knowledge of letter-sound relationships and their ability to generate automatic word recognition based on an increasing ability to orthographically map words.
This IPI procedure is designed to
a) check that these decoding skills are in place which means the working memory is now free to focus on deeper processing of the content (comprehension).
This decoding ability can be evaluated during Part 1 of the procedure as the reader makes an oral reading of an unseen text passage.
b) provide a measure of the active reading skill that the reader has developed; their ability to go beyond reading the words and construct meaning as they read.
This can be measured during Part 2 of the procedure by recording the student's ability to retell the passage and answer questions about the content.
The following video clips take you through this process.
I still like to refer to deviations that the student makes when reading the text as miscues rather than errors. It is now common practice to see the accurate sounding out of words as being the gold standard for initial reading instruction, but much additional information about a reader's reading habits can be gained by recording exactly what they are doing when reading. This will tell you whether this particular student has an efficient word attack system in place or whether there are gaps in their phonics knowledge and therefore a need for remediation.
The following video clip identifies a variety of common miscues and how these can be recorded as the reader is reading the text aloud.
How to record 'Miscues' and how to calculate the Accuracy score..
When this assessment procedure was developed some time ago, it was based on the theory of 'The Three Cueing System' which promoted the idea that as the reader reads the text they use three sources of information to get reading accuracy,
They ask themselves
"Does that make sense?"
"Does that sound right?"
"Does that look right?"
By analysing which cueing systems are being used when a reader encounters decoding difficulty and which are being ignored, the teacher now has data that can help them make decisions about ongoing instruction—which cueing systems need to be strengthened.
Modern cognitive research has debunked this theory. It has now been proven that a concept of three cueing systems that the working memory sorts through in the process of decoding a word is a very inefficient explanation of what the brain is actually doing at lightning speed.
A much superior use of instructional time is to teach letter-sound relationships (phonics) and develop the brain's ability to orthographically map this knowledge and letter combinations to aid automatic word recognition.
I have left the following video in for those who are interested in what was originally included in this assessment procedure, but it must be understood in light of the current research.
What do I do with the Miscue Data I have collected?
1. Is my student using the visual clues? Given that visual cueing (sounding out the word phonetically) is by far the most important word attack strategy, check whether this is happening. If it is happening but is inefficient then there is work to do in the area of phonics. If it is not evident then you have some alarm bells ringing.
2. Is my student making substitutions that make sense but show a lack of attention to visual accuracy?
This is a big problem and the student needs phonics remediation.
What do I do with Self-Correction Data I have collected?
1. The student miscues a word and then immediately self-corrects.
This is a very positive outcome. It suggests that the reader has recognised a visual discrepancy between what the have initially said and the letter-sound information that is available in the word.
2. The student miscues a word and reads on (maybe to the end of the sentence) and then comes back and self-corrects.
This is also a positive outcome because it suggests that the student is monitoring the meaning of what they are reading. However, this should be established as a secondary monitoring strategy. It is MOST important that the check for visual discrepancies is the first and foremost strategy used.
Make sure you have read the above before viewing this video
PLEASE NOTE: 'The 3 Cueing System' presented here is no longer considered to be best practice.
"Ducks" Level 2 Reading Age 8-8.5 yrs
TASK 1: Watch the video and note the recording process for Part 1 and Part 2.
TASK 2: Download and print off the recording sheets. Listen to the test and attempt your own recording. Check your efforts against those shown in the video.
"Animal Territories" Level 7 RA 12-13 yrs
Download and print off the recording sheets for Animal Territories. Watch the video and have a go at recording the data. You can check your recording against ours in the second half of the videos.