Building the WARL: The development of the Wheldall Assessment of Reading Lists, a curriculum-based measure designed to identify young struggling readers and monitor their progress

Abstract

Early years teachers are in need of efficient measures to identify young students who are not making adequate progress in learning to read. The Wheldall Assessment of Reading Lists (WARL) has been developed to meet this need. The test, a curriculum-based measure of word identification fluency, consists of a series of parallel lists of frequently used words from children's texts and storybooks. Following a pilot study with 57 Year 1 students that satisfactorily demonstrated the equivalence of five trial word lists, 15 lists were subsequently trialled with 112 Year 1 students. The participants were also assessed on a battery of standardised and curriculum-based measures of reading. The WARL word lists were shown to inter-correlate highly with each other and also to correlate highly with other standardised measures of reading. The test appears to be both a valid and a reliable measure that can be used to identify young struggling readers and to monitor their progress following intervention.