LEARN NC

people reading on benches

Ongoing assessment for reading

By Jeanne Gunther

1.7 Quantitative analysis

By doing some simple calculations from your running record, you can not only get a better sense of how well the child is reading but select more appropriate texts for further running records.

Error ratio

The error ratio, the ratio of errors to running words (total words read), should fall between 1:10 and 1:20 in order for the teacher to have “good opportunities…to observe children’s processing of texts.”1 If the student makes too many errors, the reading is too difficult, but too few errors means too few opportunities for the teacher to analyze the student’s difficulties.

To find the error ratio, place the number of errors over the number of running words, then simplify the ratio so that the top number is 1 and the bottom number is the number of running words per error. If E is the number or errors and W the number of words read, this can be expressed as 1:(W/E).

For example, if a child read a passage with 119 words and made 6 errors, the fraction you would make would be 6/119. You would then divide both the top and bottom parts of this fraction by 6, the number of errors. My error ratio would be 1:19.8. In words, we can say that the student made 1 error for every 19.8 words read. Since this ratio falls between 1:10 and 1:20, it would offer good opportunities for me to observe this student working on text.

Accuracy rate

Accuracy rate is the percentage of words read correctly. In other words, if what the child read were to be graded out of 100 points and given a percentage grade, the accuracy rate would be that grade. The accuracy rate helps you determine if the text a student is reading is at an independent, instructional or frustration level (see text selection).

To calculate the accuracy rate, use the following formula, where E is the number of errors and W the number of running words:

100 - (100 × E/W)

Using the previous example of 119 words and 6 errors, I will use those numbers to find the Accuracy Rate for the same student:

100 – (6/119 x 100)
= 100 - 600/119
= 100 - 5.04
= 94.96

So the student’s accuracy rate can be rounded to 95%.

Self-correction ratio

The self-correction ratio is the ratio of self-corrections to the total of errors and self-corrections — that is, of self-corrections to the number of errors the student would have made had he not corrected himself.

This can be expressed as SC/(E+SC), where E is errors and SC is self-corrections. Like the error ratio, this is expressed with a 1 first. Suppose that in the above example, in addition to 6 errors, the student made 3 self-corrections. Then SC/(E+SC) is 4/(6+4) = 4/10. This is then expressed as a ratio of 1 to 1/(4/10) or 1:2.5. In plain English, the student corrected 1 error for every 2.5 made.

  1. Clay, Marie M., An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (2nd ed.) (Auckland, New Zealand: Heinemann Education, 2002), 66. [return]