Ages: Grade 8
Testing Time: 3 minutes
Administration: Individual or group

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The Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension (TOSREC)
is a brief, group- or individually administered test of reading that
assesses silent reading of connected text for comprehension. The test
can be used for screening and progress monitoring, with multiple forms
available at each grade level to facilitate progress monitoring. The
test can also be used by clinicians and researchers as a brief test of
reading comprehension.

Description of the TOSREC

The TOSREC has four test forms. It was normed on a nationally-representative sample of 3,523 individuals.

The
TOSREC measures silent reading efficiency (i.e., speed and accuracy)
and comprehension. Respondents are given 3 minutes to read and verify
the truthfulness of as many sentences as possible.

For each grade
level, Form A was normed in the fall, Form B in the winter, and Form C
in the spring. This provides norms specific to the time in the school
year the TOSREC is administered. An Optional Form O is available for use
anytime throughout the year. The TOSREC provides raw scores, indexes (a
type of standard score), and percentiles. It can be administered by
classroom teachers, reading coaches, special education teachers, school
psychologists, speech and language therapists, and other professionals
who have received some training in standardized test administration. The
test can be group-administered to a classroom or other groupings of
students or adults, and it can also be administered individually.

The TOSREC provides five advantages over oral reading fluency tests for
screening and progress monitoring because of its format of reading
connected text silently for comprehension.

1. Group administration
   is possible, which dramatically improves efficiency and cost
   effectiveness. This savings in efficiency and cost effectiveness is
   particularly important for school-wide screening and progress
   monitoring.
2. The kind of reading that is assessed by the TOSREC
   has greater ecological validity than do oral reading fluency tasks. The
   ultimate goal of reading instruction is to help students read silently
   and efficiently for comprehension. Important differences exist between
   silent reading and oral reading. For example, reading rate is
   substantially slower for oral reading than for silent reading.
   Vocalization also requires additional effort and provides a source of
   aural input that must be processed concurrently with reading. This
   occupies working memory that otherwise could be devoted to
   comprehension.
3. Comprehension is assessed explicitly and affects
   scoring directly. Although some oral reading fluency tasks involve
   asking comprehension questions to encourage readers to read for
   comprehension as opposed to merely call out the words, comprehension
   performance does not impact scoring directly. Performance on oral
   reading fluency tests usually is reported as words read correctly per
   minute, with no adjustment depending on whether or not comprehension
   questions are answered correctly. For the TOSREC, failure to correctly
   verify the meaning of a sentence impacts scoring directly.
4. Nationally
   representative norms are available. Although empirically established
   benchmarks are available for some oral reading fluency tasks, nationally
   representative standard scores and percentiles, collected for a
   standardized set of passages, typically are not available. The TOSREC
   provides both standard scores and percentiles along with standardized
   directions and forms, thereby making it possible to compare an
   individual's performance on the TOSREC to national norms.
5. Embarrassment
   on the part of poor readers is avoided. In practice, some poor readers,
   especially older poor readers or English language learners, are
   embarrassed at having to read aloud in the presence of an examiner to
   the point that their performance is affected and the testing situation
   is uncomfortable. The TOSREC avoids the embarrassment experienced by
   some respondents associated with reading aloud.

Aspects of Reading Measured by the TOSREC

The
TOSREC measures the efficiency with which connected text can be read
silently for comprehension. As such, it provides a snapshot of an
individual's ability to perform the end product of actually
comprehending print, as opposed to measuring only a single component of
reading such as word-level decoding or fluent word recognition. The
TOSREC requires fluent recognition of printed words, ability to process
grade-level appropriate sentence structure, knowledge of
grade-level-appropriate vocabulary, adequate working memory capacity to
process realistic sentences, the ability to make appropriate inferences,
and possession of relevant background knowledge.

Uses of the TOSREC

The
TOSREC was designed for multiple purposes including efficient and
cost-effective (a) screening for the identification of poor readers, (b)
group progress monitoring of all readers, and (c) assessment by
clinicians and researchers of silent reading of connected text for
comprehension.

EACH COMPLETE TOSREC KIT INCLUDES: Examiners Manual with Scoring Keys CD,
25 Profile Record Forms, and 25 each of Student Response Booklets Form
A, Form B, Form C, and Form O, all in a sturdy storage box. 2010