Technolandy

Day 45 (of 2025/26) Reading inventories … who sets the standards to which others are held to?

Funny that I was thinking about the topic of reading as part of entering school and then Chris Kennedy helped provide some writing to help drive some direction: https://cultureofyes.ca/2025/11/04/beyond-the-score-can-ai-make-literacy-screeners-more-human/

My bias: as a librarian for much of my career (currently still working on conceptualizing a comic book library as necessity in schools) I do believe reading is an essential component of an educated citizen and that reading literacy remains vital – which is why/where I promote the essential nature of building key basic skills on learning to read so that reading to learn…. And here I shift a bit… becomes one of the tools for students to use on their learning journeys.

I have long been unstressed with some aspects of students ‘being behind’ in reading levels… one-two years is interesting, 4 makes me nervous… I am more stressed when learners comment that they hate reading… though neurological shares have made me think more about this… especially as I have long mentioned how books can create wonderful pictures and stories in ones brain… and now know that some brains to not translate words into images… 

I have long rolled my eyes when educators (and politicians) proclaim a goal to have all students reading at grade level by the end of grade 3 (or similar) because:

A) not all kids will – there are a variety of learning challenges and medical issues that make this statement (again… as with so much in education) look good on paper, but not workable in real life.

B) ‘grade level’ is so vague a term (even age level) when we acknowledge that kids learn at different rates and capacities… 

C) who says what a ‘grade level’ ought to be… I know (and have studied) on how these varied determinations have been made… but in synthesis, I can’t help but think deeper about how these scales have also limited student curiosity in reading…

D) are we really taking reading scores seriously when we don’t have full time librarians in every school? (And another based on fte to provide prep time et al)?  I know there is a lot of good parts of The Science of Reading, but objectively… reading is also an art, and joy needs to be part of the unpacking of reading skills – and I ain’t seen much fan fiction for the reproducible black line masters we make kids read – as librarian, even for the youngest readers, learners could always take two books – one the teacher would like them to read [practice] and one that they are curious about … even if it is well above their “reading level” – unless there was a wait list for a popular book that got shelved… gotta chase the right story even if you surpass the “rule of thumb” (one finger for each unknown word on a page – if all fingers down, the book may be more frustrating than it’s worth… may. be… 

Admittedly I am a fan of reading inventories – I have found them invaluable when working with classes and cohorts of students. When used right, they are formative in nature and help generate ‘next steps for reading’…. That said, some reflections can be very disheartening… but the information can be surprising (had a very slow methodical reader that I thought was getting frustrated share that they enjoyed reading and excelled at the comprehension follow-up questions as well as the connection/synthesis chat… I didn’t expect that (on first reading experience)

We need to be mindful that reading inventories are more mirrors than actual measurers (the topic being read matters… you can’t convince me that schema does not play a role in reading assessments) – and a reading inventory should reveal what a learner can do, not merely identify what they can’t (yet). 

And scarily, AI is doing a very good job – check out Microsoft Learning Accelerators Reading options!!

I hope that reading inventories will continue to highlight the best inventory is the conversation = ideally with a student talking about a book they loved, a teacher listening for what lit them up, not what tripped them up – and a librarian who can guide them into the wonderful world that reading can enable… or helping unpack some other approaches if the brain doesn’t (as confirmed with a discussion today) create pictures in the mind based on the words it reads… sometimes words stay words…

And some thoughts/points to discuss later:

I’ll continue to argue that if a reading inventory doesn’t help leave a learner wanting to read more, we’re inventorying them wrong…

Remember that reading levels were designed to help publishers and teachers group materials efficiently – not to define a child’s identity as a reader – too many have shared with me the moment they realized that they wouldn’t understand others talking about loving reading…

I’m hoping we make use of the inventories not as tools to predict success, but as invitations to keep reading (and read beyond black line masters focused only on ‘learning to read’ – gotta learn how to love reading… 

Just a reminder that using standards and screening reading is only part of the conversation with the reader!