READINESS TESTS
MARY JANE G MONTEMAYOR
There are several basic limitations in the use of most reading readiness test. First, most test are limited in the sampling of abilities they include. some measure only auditory vocabulary; others omit any evaluation of such factors as visual or auditory discrimination, articulation, or auditory comprehension. A second common limitation in readiness test is the tendency to depend upon measures of preschool learning such as matching or even reading words and letters. Because of this content, many readiness test are not much more than concealed measures of intelligence determined by sampling the child’s preschool learning. Finally, most readiness test do not yield very accurate predictions of later reading success. Their correlations with reading are usually about 0.5 or 0.6, relationship which gives a prediction twenty-five to thirty per cent better than sheer chance. Is it surprising that careful teacher observation and judgement often yield predictions just as accurate as any readiness test?
Some of these inherent difficulties in the use of readiness tests could be overcome by more intelligent planning for interpretation of the results,, the norms or standards given by the publisher are seldom appropriate to the particular class being tested. norms based on many classes drawn from both rural and urban areas, from industrial and agricultural communities, from large school systems and small, and from high and low socio-economic groups are seldom meaningful in any one particular class. Predictions based on these general norms are more inclined to predictive error the more individual class is. One solution to this problem is the accumulation of local norms based on all the first grades or kindergartens in the local school systems or, if the number of classes in one year is very small, on the accumulation of norms based on successive years. This type of norm, like all others, assumes that the different groups are sufficiently similar in intelligence and socio-economic background to warrant combining the scores. — oOo—
The author is Teacher III at Remedios Elementary School