The Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) was developed by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), in response to Texas House Bill 72 (1984), which mandated a new basic skills assessment program for mathematics, reading, and writing at grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. This is one in a series of Instructional Strategies Guides designed to familiarize Texas educators with the types of strategies employed in assessing learner mastery of TEAMS objectives and to provide suggested instructional activities that can be used to promote mastery of those objectives. This guide focuses on the TEAMS reading objectives for grade 9. It provides detailed description of the test items used to measure each reading objective. The eleven objectives are subsumed under five skills: (1) main idea; (2) word meaning (vocabulary recognition); (3) detail (specific, sequence); (4) inference (drawing conclusions, facts and opinion, cause and effect, generalization from detail, author's point of view); and (5) reference usage (identifying reference sources, using graphic aids). The following information is provided for each objective: (1) a description of the objective; (2) a sample item; (3) test questions; (4) answer choices; (5) answer analysis for the sample item; (6) instructional emphases; and (7) possible instructional activities. (JAZ)