Ages: 7-0 through 17-11

Testing Time: 45 minutes or less

Administration: Individual

The Test of Reading Comprehension - Fourth Edition (TORC-4) is an innovative approach to testing silent reading comprehension that can be used to (a) identify children and adolescents who score significantly below their peers and who therefore might need help in improving their reading proficiency and comprehension, (b) document student progress in remedial programs, and (c) serve as a research tool in studies investigating reading problems in children and adolescents. It was normed on 1,942 students in 14 states.

The test has five subtests, all of which measure word identification and contextual meaning. Studies in the TORC-4 manual indicate that the test has high reliability and strong validity, especially criterion-prediction validity.

•Relational Vocabulary - From the Student Question Booklet, the student reads a set of three words that are in some way related to each other. The student is to then silently read another four words and choose two words that are related to the first set of three words.

•Sentence Completion - From the Student Question Booklet, the student silently reads a sentence that is missing two words. The student then silently reads a list of word pairs and chooses the word pair that best completes the sentence.

•Paragraph Construction - After silently reading a list of sentences that are not in logical order, the student must then rearrange the sentences to form a coherent paragraph.

•Text Comprehension - Students silently read a short passage and then answer five multiple-choice questions relative to the passage.

•Contextual Fluency - This subtest measures how many individual words students can recognize, in 3 minutes, in a series of passages taken from the Text Comprehension Subtest. Each passage, printed in uppercase letters without punc... (more)