Successful implementation of the Common Core State Standards (2010) will require an alignment between learning standards, effective instruction, and the new assessments designed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced (SB) consortia. Both the CCSS and the new generation of assessments…

Provides a sample debate which sets forth some major assumptions of two reading programs--a prescriptive reading inventory approach and an environmental reading approach. (HOD)

Suggests that children's writing is an excellent source of pertinent information about spelling and word recognition skills and analyzes one child's writing to demonstrate how an analysis of misspellings might proceed and how information obtained might be used to direct future instruction. (Author/RB)

Suggest six steps to follow in preparing to teach prescriptively. (MKM)

Discusses the "diagnostic and prescriptive" instructional model for teaching young children in the United States to read, and cautions teachers not to rely too heavily on this approach but to remember that much of what they do is art. (JM)

Suggests that early identification should not focus on predicting which children will fail, but should concentrate on determining which skills children need in order to be successful in reading. (JM)

Argues that computers can be used in schools or reading clinics to maintain skill banks for organizing information about materials, tests, and prescriptive recommendations. (FL)

Argues that computers can be used by reading teachers in a number of ways, including (1) as a diagnostic test administrator, (2) as a target for student hostility, (3) as a "tutee" for poor readers, (4) as a conversationalist, (5) as an accuracy trainer, and (6) as a game partner. (FL)

Discusses the problems inherent in the most common approaches to evaluating children's oral reading and proposes a more flexible diagnostic teaching approach. (FL)

Describes the process of diagnostic teaching (which integrates assessment and instruction) in terms of three related tasks: planning, executing, and evaluating. Discusses the advantages of diagnostic teaching. (MG)

Reports on what started out to be a survey of the use of the informal reading inventory (IRI) by teachers that revealed the technique to be embedded in a complex environment. Concludes that the use of IRIs and other diagnostic methods can be limited when teachers do not have primary responsibility for making placement decisions. (FL)

Recommends the use of a combination analytic-synthetic approach to phonics instruction, preceded by pretesting to determine the student's stage of phonic skill development. (RW)

Responds to McNeil's proposal for assessing teacher competency, arguing that the technique (1) is unrepresentative of a teacher's behavior, (2) uses inappropriate statistical techniques, and (3) is punative rather than diagnostic. (VJ)