There is no one test that can be used to assess comprehensively a child's or adolescent's literacy. That's according to a review of eight established literacy tests by Jane Hurry and Estelle Doctor at the Institute of Education in London, who say more tests need to be developed that are explicitly tied to psychological theory. Meanwhile, they argue, assessors must carefully select a combination of tests to use.

Hurry and Doctor explain that literacy ability consists of three cognitive abilities: word recognition (involving both a direct lexical route and a non-lexical route that converts letters to sounds), comprehension and writing.

There are tests like the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) and the Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB) that measure children's and adolescents' non-lexical word recognition, but they don't gauge lexical (whole word) reading. In that regard, the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) is arguably superior because it measures both routes to word recognition. However, an assessor using TOWRE would still need other tests to measure comprehension and writing.

For testing comprehension there is the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability - Second Revised British Edition (NARA II). A strength of this test is that the assessor is able to help the child out with any words they can't decode. This ensures the measure of comprehension is not confounded by the child's word recognition abilities. However, the NARA II is undermined by the fact 65 per cent of its comprehension questions only address superficial understanding rather than inference or integration of meaning. By contrast, the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimensions (WORD) contains a greater proportion of questions testing deeper understanding, but it fails to guard against the potential confound of the child's word recognition abilities.

To assess writing ability, there is the Test of Written Language (TOWL), which was last standardised in 1993 on an American sample of 3,056 participants. The TOWL tests correct use of vocabulary, spelling, style, logical sentence construction as well as context and sentence combining.  Hurry and Doctor report the TOWL has content validity, criterion-related validity and construct validity – that is, it accurately assesses all aspects of writing ability.

In conclusion, Hurry and Doctor write that: "In order to thoroughly assess the key theoretical dimensions of literacy, the assessor must utilise a wide array of tests and exercise a degree of critical discrimination". They argue that comprehensive literacy profiling based on a combination of tests can lead to a better an understanding of a child's strengths and weaknesses, so informing teaching decisions.

Web Directions

Hurry, J. & Doctor, E. (2007). Assessing Literacy in Children and Adolescents. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 12, 38–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-3588.2006.00420.x

The Language and Literacy Research Centre: http://ioewebserver.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=1076

The National Literacy Trust: http://www.literacytrust.org.uk

The UK Literacy Association: http://www.ukla.org/