Listening to and analysing a student's reading behaviour will always be the most effective method of observing and understanding the decoding strategies that a reader is using.

The cognitive process of comprehension is much more difficult to measure. Getting the reader to retell the content read and then respond to questions provides you with valuable information about whether the text has been processed and understood or whether the reader is relying on word recognition.

The three criteria included in these Informal Prose Inventories, Accuracy, Retelling, and Comprehension, provide a reliable indicator of the instructional reading age that a student should be working on, and establish a benchmark against which progress can be measured.