The problem I had with the San Diego Quick Assessment is that when I would keep going with the test after "frustration level" was reached, the kid would go for several levels getting one and two wrong. What does that mean?
It means that this is a screening instrument that works with the middle +/- 1 SD pretty well, but isn't so sharp for children with atypical profiles.
I don't know exactly what it means for any specific child, without seeing their test behavior and error analysis, plus ecological validation of my hypotheses, but I can offer some examples of possible interpretations. Some children change strategies as tasks become more difficult, moving, for example from sight reading/word calling to decoding/word attack, using phonetic and morphological principles. This can mean that they make errors around the time they reach the upper range of their sight vocabulary, often substituting visually- or morphologically-similar words (for example, omitting or substituting affixes). As words become even more challenging, they move far enough out of their familiar vocabulary that they switch to their decoding strategies for novel words, which, in a good phonetic reader, can be quite sophisticated, allowing them to progress another few levels on the strength of their word attack skills. Often, you will see them slow down a little as they switch from sight reading to decoding, which also benefits the words they actually know, but might have miscalled based on sight reading.
