What is the Test of Orthographic Competence? Inside the TOC-2

The Test of Orthographic Competence is a norm-referenced test of how well a student handles the written conventions of English, including spelling, punctuation, abbreviations and letter patterns. The current version is the Test of Orthographic Competence, Second Edition, usually shortened to TOC-2, published by PRO-ED and written by Nancy Mather, Rhia Roberts, Donald D. Hammill and Elizabeth A. Allen. According to the publisher, it covers ages 8 years 0 months through 24 years 11 months, takes 30 to 40 minutes, and can be given to one student or a whole classroom. Below is what each subtest asks for, how the five composites are built, what changed from the 2008 first edition, and where the test sits next to other literacy measures.

"Orthography" is the writing system of a language: its letters, spelling patterns, punctuation marks and symbols. Orthographic knowledge is what a reader or writer has stored in memory about that system. Kenn Apel, writing in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, defined it as the information stored in memory that tells us how to represent spoken language in written form, and argued that researchers had used the term loosely enough to end up measuring different things under one label.

That distinction matters when reading a score report. A student can know the sound structure of a word perfectly well and still fail to retrieve the correct letter string for it. Spelling "nite" for "night" is a problem with the stored visual form of the word rather than with phonics.

PRO-ED describes the TOC-2 as assessing the aspects of the English writing system that are integral to proficient reading and writing, listing letters, spelling, punctuation, abbreviations and special symbols as its content.

The second edition uses a single form for every age in its range, with six subtests, two of them timed.

• Punctuation: The student reads printed sentences with no punctuation beyond the spaces between words, such as "where is edward b brown", and edits each one to supply what is missing.

• Abbreviations: The student is given printed abbreviations, for example 4:00, Dr. and USA, and writes out what each one means.

• Sight Spelling: The examiner says a word aloud while the student sees a partial spelling with letters removed. For "know" the student sees a fragment ending in "ow" and supplies the missing letters, which are chosen to include an irregular orthographic element.

• Homophone Spelling: The examiner says a word such as "oar" and shows a picture of a boat oar. The student writes the spelling that matches the picture rather than a sound-alike alternative.

• Word Scramble: The student unscrambles sets of letters into real words, so that "nra" becomes "ran". The publisher sets a three-minute limit on this subtest.

• Letter Choice: The student fills in a missing letter in rows of words where the missing letter is always p, d, b or q, as in "_etter" or "sai_". This one carries a two-minute limit.

Subtest scores carry more measurement error than the combinations built from them, and PRO-ED says as much: the TOC-2 composites are more reliable and valid than the subtests feeding them. There are five.

• Orthographic Knowledge: All six subtests combined. The publisher calls this the best single estimate of overall orthographic knowledge and the most reliable score on the test.

• Conventions: Punctuation plus Abbreviations, covering the parts of the writing system that lie outside spelling and are sometimes not even alphabetic.

• Spelling Accuracy: Sight Spelling plus Homophone Spelling, both untimed and both asking the student to produce one specific correct letter string.

• Spelling Fluency: Word Scramble plus Letter Choice, the two timed subtests.

• Spelling Efficiency: The four spelling subtests together, which the publisher describes as an estimate of orthographic processing, crediting Apel's framing of the construct.

The Spelling Accuracy and Spelling Fluency pairing is the useful comparison. PRO-ED notes that the two can be set against each other to see whether a student has built accurate orthographic images yet cannot retrieve them quickly. Research supports treating those as separable problems. In a study published in Child Neuropsychology, Heike Mehlhase and colleagues tested 108 fourth-graders and found that children with isolated reading fluency deficits built orthographic representations normally but accessed them slowly, while children with isolated spelling deficits recalled new words well immediately and then failed to store them precisely. A symbol-learning control task showed no group differences, pointing to something specific to written language.

The TOC-2 is scored only through the publisher's online scoring and report system, which comes with the complete kit and with replacement packs of response booklets. PRO-ED removed the normative tables from the Examiner's Manual for this edition, so there is no paper path to a score.

The system returns four kinds of normative score: age and grade equivalents, percentile ranks, subtest scaled scores and composite index scores. Subtest scaled scores use a mean of 10 and a "standard deviation" of 3, the standard deviation being a measure of how spread out scores are in the norm group. Composite indexes use the mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15 that most intelligence and achievement batteries report on. The system also generates confidence intervals and flags significant differences among a student's scores.

Norms come from 1,512 students tested from the summer of 2017 through early spring 2020. The publisher reports that the sample was stratified by age to match the United States school-age population on geographic region, race, ethnicity, gender, parent education and household income, and that it ran item-bias studies, diagnostic accuracy analyses and a confirmatory factor analysis of the test's structure.

Two limitations are worth stating plainly. Age and grade equivalents are the weakest scores in the set: a grade equivalent of 6.2 means only that the raw score matched the median of that group, and percentile ranks and standard scores carry more information. A single administration also produces an estimate with error around it, so the confidence interval belongs in any report of the result.

The original Test of Orthographic Competence appeared in 2008 and looked quite different. It covered ages 6 through 17 using three age-related forms, ran 30 to 45 minutes, drew on nine subtests that varied by form, and was normed on 1,477 individuals. Alongside the six that survive today, it had Signs and Symbols, where a child explained what a printed sign such as a card suit or a dollar sign meant; Grapheme Matching, a timed task of spotting the two identical figures in a row of five; Homophone Choice, a multiple-choice homophone task; and Word Choice, in which the student picked the correct spelling from three phonetically plausible options.

The second edition replaced the multiple-choice formats with production tasks, collapsed three forms into one, moved the floor up to age 8 and the ceiling out to 24 years 11 months, added the Spelling Efficiency composite, and renormed from scratch. PRO-ED no longer lists the first edition, and distributors mark it discontinued.

The TOC-2 is an achievement-style measure of a specific academic skill. It does not produce an IQ score, and it occupies a narrower slice of written language than several tests it is shelved beside.

• Against dictated spelling tests: A spelling measure such as the Test of Written Spelling asks a student to write words to dictation. The TOC-2 covers that ground through Sight Spelling and Homophone Spelling, then adds punctuation, abbreviations and timed letter manipulation.

• Against composition tests: The Test of Written Language, also from PRO-ED, samples vocabulary, sentence construction and extended writing. Orthographic competence is one input into that larger performance, so the two answer different questions.

• Against phonological measures: The CTOPP-2 assesses phonological awareness, phonological memory and rapid naming, all of which concern the sound structure of language rather than its written form. The two can diverge sharply in the same student.

Examiner requirements are broad by publisher standards. PRO-ED lists classroom teachers, special education teachers, reading specialists, school psychologists, speech-language pathologists and others with some training in standardized test administration.

A score on any single instrument describes a performance on a particular day, and it describes a skill rather than a person, which is as true of cognitive testing as of achievement testing. If reasoning ability rather than written convention is the question, the RIOT IQ test is an online cognitive battery for adults 18 and older, developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne. Formally the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test, it runs 15 subtests across six cognitive indices covering verbal reasoning, fluid reasoning, spatial ability, working memory, processing speed and reaction time, takes about 52 minutes, and reports scores on the same mean-100 and standard-deviation-15 scale the TOC-2 uses for its composites. It does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation.

It measures knowledge of the English writing system: punctuation, abbreviations, the spelling of irregular words and homophones, and the speed of recognizing and manipulating letter patterns. Those feed five composite scores, the broadest being Orthographic Knowledge.

PRO-ED lists an age range of 8 years 0 months through 24 years 11 months. The 2008 first edition ran from 6 to 17, so children under 8 fall outside the current norms.

The publisher gives a testing time of 30 to 40 minutes. Two subtests are separately timed, at three minutes for Word Scramble and two for Letter Choice.

Yes. The second edition uses a single form that can be administered to individuals or groups, one of the changes from the first edition's three age-banded forms.

No. It is a norm-referenced achievement measure of a specific academic skill and produces no intelligence quotient. Its composites use the same mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15 that most IQ tests use, which makes the numbers easy to compare visually without making them measures of general cognitive ability.

Age and grade equivalents, percentile ranks, subtest scaled scores with a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 3, and composite indexes with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, all generated by the publisher's online scoring system.

1. Mather, N., Roberts, R., Hammill, D. D., & Allen, E. A. (2023). TOC-2: Test of Orthographic Competence–Second Edition, complete kit [Product page]. PRO-ED. proedinc.com

2. Hogrefe. (n.d.). Test of Orthographic Competence – Second Edition (TOC-2). Hogrefe UK. hogrefe.com

3. Mind Resources. (n.d.). Test of Orthographic Competence (TOC), complete kit [Product page]. mindresources.com

4. Apel, K. (2011). What is orthographic knowledge? Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 42(4), 592–603. eric.ed.gov

5. Mehlhase, H., Bakos, S., Landerl, K., Schulte-Körne, G., & Moll, K. (2018). Orthographic learning in children with isolated and combined reading and spelling deficits. Child Neuropsychology, 25(3), 370–393. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

6. Hammill, D. D., & Larsen, S. C. (n.d.). TOWL-4: Test of Written Language–Fourth Edition, complete kit [Product page]. PRO-ED. proedinc.com

Hero photo by perpetual.fostering, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped to 16:9.