Assessing the Reading Speed and Stamina of Students with Low Vision

A teacher performs a reading assessment with a student.

This captioned video is an abbreviated session for demonstration purposes. Ordinarily this sort of assessment would be conducted in two 10 or 20 minute sessions. The goal of the assessment is to determine the print reading speed and stamina of a 16 year-old student with low vision.

The student featured was reading on grade level, as determined by a previously administered Jerry Johns Basic Reading Inventory. Her acuity was approximately 20/100 at near point with a diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa, and she had minimal exposure to reading with a magnifier. A previous individual education plan reflected new goals for learning braille, and the examiner wanted to determine the extent to which she could function comfortably and efficiently with print, including the possibility of fluency training with a hand-held magnifier. The student was asked to read for a 10 minute (timed) silent reading period broken into two continuous 5-minute intervals. Following the reading exercise, her word per minute count for the first 5 minutes of reading was compared to the second 5 minutes of reading.