DS5's decoding was reported by the DORA to be at the 12th grade level (accurate according to other testing results), reading comprehension at grade 6.5 (I'd guess lower but it's hard to tell with him), and other scores were all similarly high although fluctuating wildly. I wound up not using the DORA in advocacy because it was hard to justify the results compared to the other testing.
I did feel in our case that it was worth $20, since it gave DS5 a chance to take a test in a low-stress environment (our living room and on the potty), which may have helped him somewhat with testing anxiety after a prior disastrous experience. In addition while I can't exactly plan DS5's reading around the DORA results, some snippets of information in the report were at least interesting. I'm also of the mind that anything a child wants to read, and is actively engaged in reading, is almost certainly at an appropriate level, so simply observing one's child is a good bet.
Our IQ and achievement tester said that tests like the DORA may often score high on things like comprehension and even vocabulary because a lot of the questions are multiple choice. She did say, though, that gifted perfectionistic kids may score low on reading comprehension when tested by other methods (non-multiple-choice), due to reluctance to answer for many reasons (unsure of using vocabulary correctly in giving an answer, etc. comes to mind).
