The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability — Revised

Abstract

Summary. In 1980 steps were undertaken in Australia to commence a review of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (Neale, 1958) which culminated in a revision and restandardisation of the test in 1984. This paper outlines the major features of this revision and presents data on the reading performance of boys and girls from the standardisation sample drawn from two Australian states, Victoria and South Australia. The results overall suggest that girls and boys do not differ significantly in performance at different age levels, except in speed of reading (Rate) and word recognition skills (Accuracy), in their first year of schooling. It was also observed that differences exist between the original norms and the revised norms for Australian children and that continued use of the former would result in significantly biased estimation of the reading performance of Australian children.

The role of vocabulary, working memory and inference making ability in reading comprehension in Down syndrome

“…The DS and CAM participants were matched for reading comprehension ability as measured by the NARA II, form II (Neale, 1997). The DS and PC groups were also matched for reading comprehension as measured by the NARA II, form II.…”

“…An 8 year old girl with DS (KS) was found to have a level of reading comprehension significantly below her reading accuracy level when assessed using The Neale Analysis of Reading AbilityRevised (NARA II, form II, Neale, 1997) but not when assessed using the WORD (Wechsler, 1993). Critically, the NARA II includes questions assessing both memory for information presented in the text (literal questions) and questions that require an inference to be made, while the WORD (Wechsler, 1993) contains mainly literal questions.…”

Literacy Outcomes for Primary School Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing: A Cohort Comparison Study

“…The YARC is very similar in format to the The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA) (Neale, 1989), which has been used in previous studies of reading with DHH children, including Kyle and Harris (2006;. It presents children with a series of graded passages, each illustrated by a picture.…”

Comprehension Difficulties in Reading Disabled Children

“…However, one methodological issue in these studies concerns the choice of tasks used to reveal the poor comprehender"s profile. Oakhill and colleagues screened and selected poor comprehenders from regular mainstream classrooms based on performance on the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA-II; Neale, 1997). In this reading test, children read aloud short passages of text (generating a score for reading accuracy) and are then asked questions to assess their literal and inferential understanding of the text (generating a score for reading comprehension).…”