TPRI Early Reading Assessment

TPRI is a highly reliable early reading assessment designed to identify the reading development of students in kindergarten through third grade.

This diagnostic instrument is an easy to use one-on-one assessment, which helps teachers provide targeted instruction so that students improve as readers. The TPRI benchmark assessment is given 3 times per year. At all four grade levels, the TPRI consists of both a screening section and an inventory section.

Screening Section

The screening section of the TPRI is a brief assessment for identification of students who may be at risk for reading difficulties. Its primary purpose is to predict for teachers which of their students may need additional or intensive reading instruction in order to meet their grade level goals. The screening section also allows teachers to quickly gather information on students who are Still Developing (SD) important reading concepts in certain areas and would benefit from additional instruction.

The skills assessed on the screening tasks for different grade levels and times of year are illustrated on the following chart:

Screening	Kindergarten		First		Second	Third
Screening	BOY	EOY	BOY	EOY	BOY	BOY
Letter Sound	✔	✔	✔
Blending Onset-Rimes & Phonemes	✔	✔	✔
Word Reading			✔	✔	✔	✔

Inventory Section

The Inventory Section of the TPRI allows teachers to acquire more data to help match reading instruction with specific student needs. This additional information can assist teachers and administrators as they assemble educational resources and plan the most effective instruction possible for students. All portions of the inventory are administered with students who score Still Developing (SD) on the screening section. For Kindergarten and Grade 1 students who score Developed (D) on the screening section, the PA and GK portions of the Inventory Section are optional.

The skills assessed on the inventory for the different grade levels and times of year are illustrated on the following chart:

Inventory

Kindergarten

First

Second

Third

BOY

MOY

EOY

BOY

MOY

EOY

BOY

MOY

EOY

BOY

MOY

EOY

Book and Print Awareness

✔

Phonemic Awareness

✔

Graphophonemic Knowledge

✔

Word Reading

✔

Reading Accuracy

✔

Fluency

✔

Listening/Reading Comprehension

✔

Additional Tools

Information derived from the TPRI will assist teachers in planning targeted instruction for their students. There are many additional TPRI tools available to help teachers. For example, there are tools that help teachers analyze data, identify students for intervention, and group students for differentiated instruction. Also included is an Intervention Activities Guide, a teacher-friendly resource that includes hundreds of activities designed to help teachers target the needs of students.

Download the full Intervention Activities Guide

Blackline Masters

Some activities have associated Blackline Masters available as PDF files to download, print out, and use in your lessons. All activities open in a new window; some activities open in the Circle Activity Collection.

Phonemic Awareness

PA-8 Rhyme Concentration
PA-17 Alliteration Sort
PA-18 Alliteration Concentration
PA-26 Count the Syllables
PA-27 Segmenting Syllables with Pictures
PA-28 Syllable Swap
PA-31 Syllable EIision with Pictures
PA-35 Initial Sound Picture Sort
PA-36 Beginning Sound Bingo
PA-37 Beginning Sound Sets
PA-38 Beginning Sound Concentration
PA-40 Ending Sound Picture Sort
PA-41 Ending Sound Sets
PA-43 Ending Sound Concentration
PA-44 Comparing Middle Long Vowel Sounds
PA-45 Comparing Middle Short Vowel Sounds
PA-46 Blending Onset-Rime Pictures
PA-47 Onset-Rime Sort
PA-49 Critter Sitter
PA-53 Blending Bee
PA-56 Initial Sound Elision with Pictures
PA-58 Final Sound Elision with Pictures
PA-61 Onset-Rime Segmenting with Pictures
PA-62 Segmenting Phonemes with Counters
PA-63 Segmenting Phonemes with Pictures
PA-64 Segmenting Memory
PA-67 Move the Sounds

Graphophonemic Knowledge

Fluency

FLU-7 Buddy Reading | View in the Circle Activity Collection
FLU-8 Timed Repeated Readings
FLU-12 Student Fluency Graphs

Vocabulary

VOC-17 Word Maps: Synonyms and Antonyms
VOC-21 Mapping Multiple-Meaning Words
VOC-22 Concept Definition Map
VOC-23 Semantic Web | View in the Circle Activity Collection
VOC-24 Memory Hunt: Homonyms
VOC-27 Word Sort: Prefixes and Suffixes
VOC-31 Semantic Feature Analysis
VOC-36 Vocabulary Map

Comprehension

Writing

WRI-3 Using a Self-Monitoring Checklist at the Sentence Level
WRI-9 Writing a Summary Paragraph from a Simple Web
WRI-15 Revising | View in the Circle Activity Collection
WRI-16 Editing and Publishing | View in the Circle Activity Collection
WRI-17 Assessing Writing

About TPRI

How was the TPRI Developed?

The current TPRI is the product of more than 10 years of development and studies conducted with more than 15,000 Texas students. Decisions about the modification of the TPRI have been made using data collected in recent studies of students, along with feedback from classroom teachers, and school and district administrators. While the TPRI maintains the overall design of previous versions, with separate Screening and Inventory Sections, the Screening Section has been revalidated at kindergarten, first and second grade, and many screening items have been replaced. The Inventory Section features an additional Word Reading task at each grade level and new items throughout, along with new stories and comprehension questions. The latter are the result of a rigorous development process roughly divided into two broad stages: 1) Story Development and 2) Story Piloting and Research.

Story Development

New stories were written and studied for inclusion in the current TPRI. Representing a range of difficulty levels for each grade and written on a variety of topics of interest to students, the stories conform to specific guidelines for children’s literature. They were written to conform to specific word-level features based on what’s taught at each grade level. Narrative stories were written to include the following elements:

Main character(s) – Who or what the story is mainly about.
Setting – Where and when the story happens.
Problem – What the main character wants or the problem that has to be solved.
Major events – Most important things that happen to solve the problem.
Outcome – Whether or not the problem is solved.

Expository texts that conform to informational text structure also were included. To determine what is typically taught, several reading series, district curriculum guides and reading standards (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, in Texas) were consulted. As a result, allowable word-level features do not reflect any one publisher’s or district’s scope and sequence, but rather the reading standards. After the stories were written, readability and lexile formulas were run.

Story Piloting and Research

Once written, the new stories were tested in a pilot study of about 3,000 Texas students. The study examined how accurately students read the stories orally, the fluency rate at which students read them and how well students were able to answer comprehension questions about the stories. (Kindergarten stories were read to kindergarten students.) Stories were selected from among those piloted based on which were most reliable in assessing accuracy, fluency and comprehension across all students who read (or listened to) the stories.

Grade Equivalents for TPRI Stories

TPRI is not a norm-referenced instrument, so the stories do not have grade equivalents or percentile ranks. In the early grades, grade-equivalent scores are highly unreliable. Instead, TPRI is criterion referenced. With respect to the stories, this means the phonic elements and story grammar elements increase in difficulty from grade 1 to 2. In grade 2, the vocabulary level also is higher and the sentence structure more complex. It’s unreliable to think in terms of grade equivalents, because a student who reads at the Frustrational Level on Story 1 at the beginning of the year, may read at grade level by the end of the year due to excellent instruction.

For more in-depth information about TPRI and how it was developed, please contact us.

TPRI for Your School

Purchase TPRI

Orders for Electronic Versions of the TPRI & Progress Monitoring Kits Nationwide

Check with the following licensed vendors for specific options:

Free Access for Texas Schools

All Texas public school districts and charter schools have free access to the 1st and 2nd grade versions of TPRI on the CLI Engage platform beginning in the 2020-2021 school year. Learn more on CLI Engage.

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For questions relating to TPRI administration on CLI Engage, please submit a Help Ticket.