Standardized Reading Assessment Tools: Indispensable, Though not without Limitations

Reading ability is fundamental to individuals’ academic success and lifelong learning as it plays a pivotal role in knowledge acquisition, thinking skill development, and even social participation. Reading is a complicated cognitive process, and reading ability is deemed an intricate construct, ranging from the mastery of lower-level processing like decoding skills to that of higher-level processing like reading comprehension (Sprenger-Charolles & Messaoud-Galusi, 2009). The issue of how to scientifically and systematically assess students’ reading proficiency has been a highly debated topic in the education research community.