The Pre-Reading Assessment Inventory (PRAI) was designed to fill a need for a wide-range, individually administered diagnostic test of a child's prereading skills (especially auditory blending and segmenting), knowledge, encoding and decoding strategies, and understandings about the reading task. The test development was based upon the research literature on prereading and early reading, the evaluation of other prereading tests, and two sets of year-long observations of beginning readers by the staff of the Early Decoding and Encoding Strategies Project. After pilot testing and revision, 283 kindergarten children from a variety of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds were given the test. Achievement was evaluated one year later when 161 children were given the Gates-MacGinitie Reading test, the Diagnostic Test of Spelling, and the Gray Oral Reading Paragraphs. The PRAI subtest reliabilities were high considering the age of the children and the short length of the subtest. Regression equations yielded multiple correlations between r=.55 and r=.71, though there was a wide range in the correlations between individual subtests and the achievement measures. (Author/FL)