Performance of elementary-grade African American students on the Gray Oral Reading Tests

African American students perform disproportionately more poorly on standardized reading assessments than their majority peers. Poor reading performances may be related to test biases inherent in standardized reading instruments. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Tests-Third Edition (GORT-3; Wiederholt & Bryant, 1992) for assessing the reading abilities of elementary-grade African American students.

Performances of 65 typically developing African American second through fifth graders were examined on the GORT-3.

African American English (AAE) was produced by most students while reading passages from the GORT-3 that were written in Standard American English (SAE). A scoring correction for AAE resulted in a statistical improvement in the performance distributions, but this did not appear to be educationally significant. Measures of total feature production predicted reading accuracy and rate, but not comprehension.

Findings are discussed in terms of the appropriateness of this instrument for use by speech-language pathologists as they contribute to curricular and classroom placement decisions in schools with large numbers of typically developing African American students.