ETS Diagnostic measures the five foundational reading skills and reading comprehension. The five skills are, Word Recognition and Decoding, Vocabulary, Morphology, Sentence Processing, and Reading Efficiency.

ETS Diagnostic is the most thorough and accurate diagnostic assessment to date. Thus, the assessment is longer than most and usually takes anywhere from 45 minutes to 1 hour to complete all six subtests. Subtests can be split into their component parts to break up testing times.

It is recommended to administer the entire assessment seasonal. 3 times a year to measure progress.

ETS Diagnostic has 3 tiers of difficulty. 3-12 is the range of grade levels that can benefit from ETS Diagnostic.

The Common Core has standards for foundational skills up until grade 5.

http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/

They cover constructs related to ETS Diagnostic including decoding, word recognition, fluency, and morphology. ETS Diagnostic augments the standards by allowing us to measure the 5 foundational skills beyond grade 5 (where the common core ends). Failure to measure foundational skills beyond grade 5, is a potential failure to detect key sources of the problem.

ETS Diagnostic will work well for identifying foundational skills weaknesses for EL’s.