Diagnosis in Special Education

Gray Oral Reading Diagnostic Test (GORT)
The Gray Oral Reading Test is a norm-referenced, individually administered test for readers ages six to eighteen. It takes 15-45 minutes to administer. Its purpose is to identify students who need help with oral reading and to identify their strengths and weaknesses. It is also used to document progress and for research purposes. The student is asked to read aloud for one minute and the administrator tracks errors, after which the student answers five multiple-choice comprehension questions. Mean standard score is 100, with a norm sample representative of the US school-aged population. It is considered reliable both for internal consistency and test-retest.

Woodcock diagnostic Reading Battery (WDRB)
The Woodcock Reading Mastery Test is a norm-referenced test applicable to readers in kindergarten through age 75. It consists of six individually administered tests to identify strengths and weaknesses in visual-auditory learning, letter identification, word identification, word attack skills, word comprehension, and passage comprehension. during the test, the reader must pronounce words in isolation, read nonsense words, identify synonyms, antonyms, and analogies. The scores from these sub-tests are almost always clustered to derive basic skills or comprehension scores. The norm sample is representative of US School-aged population and the test is reliable for internal consistency with ranges from .8 upward, with most .9 or above.

Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test(SDRT)
The Stanford Diagnostic Test is a group-administered measure of phonetic analysis, vocabulary, comprehension, and scanning. It is given to readers grades 1.5 through 13. It takes 15 to 45 minutes to administer. The scores can be transformed into progress indicators, percentile ranks, grade equivalents, and scaled scores. Norm-referenced scores can be used to identify weaknesses and strengths, evaluate progress, and identify trends and class, school, and district levels. The test is norm-referenced to represent US school-aged population. It is considered reliable for both internal consistency and alternate form, making it sufficient for making decisions about individual students.

STAR
The STAR (Standardized Test of for the Assessment of Reading)is a criterion-based test, not a norm-based test. It is used to provide instructional reading levels for individual students for the purpose of planning initial instruction. During the test, the student will identify correct word choices to place in a sentence with a missing word. The choice must have both the correct meaning and be correct syntactically. Its reliability for instructional reading level ranges from .79 to .91 It comes on software and can produce immediate scores.