What is the TOSWRF-2? The Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency explained

The TOSWRF-2, short for the Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency, Second Edition, is a 3-minute test of how many printed words a person can recognize accurately and quickly. Written by Nancy Mather, Donald D. Hammill, Elizabeth A. Allen, and Rhia Roberts and published by PRO-ED in 2014, it covers ages 6 years 3 months through 24 years 11 months and can be given to one student or a whole classroom by a teacher, reading specialist, school psychologist, or other educator trained in standardized testing. The TOSWRF-2 is not an IQ test. It measures a learned academic skill, silent word recognition under time pressure, and serves as a reading screener and progress monitor rather than a measure of reasoning ability. This article explains the test's format, its norms and scores, what independent research says about its validity, and where it sits relative to an intelligence test.

According to PRO-ED, the TOSWRF-2 "provides a reliable and valid measure of students' ability to recognize printed words accurately and efficiently." The publisher describes the format as one originally pioneered by J. P. Guilford in his Structure of Intellect studies. Students see rows of printed words, arranged from easiest to hardest, with no spaces between them, such as "dimhowfigblue." The student draws a line between the boundaries of as many words as possible in 3 minutes, so the row becomes "dim/how/fig/blue." The raw score is the number of words correctly marked.

A 2023 meta-analytic review in the journal Reading and Writing Quarterly, led by Daniel Wissinger, adds detail. Each form contains 220 unrelated words printed in lowercase, beginning at the pre-primer level and rising to adult vocabulary, chosen so that no new word forms where two words meet. The reviewers call this a "slasher" format.

Two features set the test apart from most reading measures.

• Silent rather than oral: Most fluency tests ask a student to read aloud while an examiner counts errors. The TOSWRF-2 requires no speech, and PRO-ED updated the second edition's instructions to expand its use with deaf and hard of hearing students.

• Group or individual administration: PRO-ED states that any one of the four forms "may be administered to a single child or an entire classroom of children." A single form takes 3 minutes; two forms take 6 minutes and raise reliability. That efficiency is why the test is used for school-wide screening and, according to the publisher, for progress monitoring up to four times a year.

The original Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency appeared in 2004. A 2005 review in the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment by Ashley Williams and Sherry Mee Bell reported that the first edition covered ages 6 years 6 months to 17 years 11 months. PRO-ED lists the main changes for the 2014 edition.

• New norms: Normative data were collected between 2009 and 2012, and the test was co-normed with its companion the TOSCRF-2 (the Test of Silent Contextual Reading Fluency, Second Edition) and the Test of Written Spelling, Fifth Edition.

• Wider age range: Norms now run from 6 years 3 months through 24 years 11 months, adding the college-age population.

• Four alternate forms instead of two: Forms A through D are equivalent, allowing repeated testing without students remembering the items. A one-minute practice form was added to each test form.

• Expanded validity evidence: The publisher states that validity studies now include work by independent researchers and that its validity research now examines "diagnostic accuracy," including sensitivity and specificity.

PRO-ED also notes that the first edition served as an outcome measure in the Reading First Impact Study, the congressionally mandated evaluation of the reading program created under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. According to the final report, published by the Institute of Education Sciences in 2008, the TOSWRF was given to first graders in 248 schools in spring 2007 as "a measure of decoding skill," and Reading First produced a statistically significant gain of 2.5 standard score points on it.

PRO-ED reports that the norms are based on a representative sample of more than 2,429 individuals from 35 states. The test yields raw scores, standard scores, percentiles, and age and grade equivalents. According to the Wissinger review, the standard scores use the familiar scale with a mean of 100 and a "standard deviation," a measure of how spread out scores are, of 15 points, so roughly two thirds of examinees fall between 85 and 115.

Because this is the same scale IQ tests use, it is easy to misread a TOSWRF-2 score as a statement about general ability. It is not. The number describes how many words a student identified in 3 minutes relative to same-age peers. Grade equivalents deserve extra caution: the Reading First study team noted the publisher's own warning that comparisons between standard scores and grade equivalents "will likely yield discrepancies due to the unreliability of the grade equivalents," and used standard scores as its key metric for that reason.

The Wissinger review also summarizes reliability figures from the test's technical documentation: test-retest estimates of .92 and .91 for Forms A and B, alternate-form reliability of .86 (immediate) and .89 (delayed), and correlations of .57 to .77 with other standardized reading measures such as the Woodcock-Johnson III. Those figures are respectable for a 3-minute group test.

The most thorough independent look at the test is the 2023 meta-analysis by Wissinger, Truckenmiller, Konek, and Ciullo, which pooled 47 published studies involving 47,616 participants in which the TOSWRF or the TOSCRF was given alongside at least one other standardized reading measure. The question was whether scores on the silent fluency tests differ from scores on the longer batteries schools would otherwise use. They differ very little. The weighted average difference was trivial, an effect size of about 0.07, and the average standard score gap was 2 points. The type of reading skill measured by the comparison test, whether decoding, word identification, oral fluency, vocabulary, or comprehension, did not significantly change that result. The authors concluded that TOSWRF scores "are strong indicators of how well students are likely to perform across a broad range of reading competency tests." One caution: English language learners scored somewhat higher on the silent fluency tests than on other reading measures, so the test may understate their difficulties relative to a fuller battery.

The 2005 review of the first edition adds a useful limit. Williams and Bell found strong correlations with other speeded word identification tasks and moderate correlations with reading comprehension, noted that the test does not measure "prosody," the expressive phrasing that only oral reading reveals, and stated that it "is not intended for use in diagnosing or placement decisions." A passage-level oral measure such as the GORT-5 fills in what the TOSWRF-2 leaves out.

The TOSWRF-2 is an achievement measure. It tells an educator how automatically a student recognizes printed words, a skill built through instruction and practice. An intelligence test measures reasoning and problem solving across many domains and is designed so that specific schooling matters as little as possible. The two are correlated in the general population, since children who reason well tend to learn to read well, yet they are separate constructs and can diverge sharply in an individual.

Research on dyslexia illustrates the point. A longitudinal study by Emilio Ferrer, Sally Shaywitz, and colleagues, published in Psychological Science in 2010, found that reading and IQ develop in a "dynamically linked" way in typical readers, while in readers with dyslexia the two develop more independently. The authors describe this "uncoupling" as the core of the definition of dyslexia. A timed test like the TOSWRF-2 measures the reading side of that gap; a properly normed intelligence test measures the reasoning side.

Speed is where the two kinds of test come closest. As the video above explains, reaction time has been studied as a correlate of intelligence since the earliest days of the field, and modern IQ batteries often include a processing speed index. The TOSWRF-2 also rewards speed, though the speed it rewards belongs to a practiced, specific skill. Our article on whether IQ and reaction time are correlated walks through the general evidence.

In an evaluation for a reading disability, the TOSWRF-2 typically appears beside an individually administered oral measure such as the TOWRE-2, which times sight word and nonword reading aloud, along with untimed decoding tests, comprehension measures, and often an ability test. Any conclusion about a disability is a professional judgment made by a qualified evaluator; no single test, and no online test, detects a disorder on its own.

No. It measures how many printed words a person can recognize in 3 minutes, a learned reading skill. It shares the mean-100, standard-deviation-15 scale with IQ tests and assesses a different construct.

PRO-ED lists 3 minutes for a single form or 6 minutes for any two forms, plus a one-minute practice form and directions.

Ages 6 years 3 months through 24 years 11 months, according to PRO-ED.

They are co-normed companions. The TOSWRF-2 presents isolated words with no spaces; the TOSCRF-2 presents whole passages without spaces or punctuation, so it also draws on sentence structure, vocabulary, and comprehension.

No. The publisher describes it as a tool to identify and monitor students with word-level reading difficulties. A diagnosis requires a comprehensive evaluation by a qualified professional.

The TOSWRF-2 answers a narrow question quickly and well: how efficiently does this student recognize printed words compared with peers? Its limits follow from that design. It contains no sentences, no comprehension questions, and no oral reading, its norms date from 2009 to 2012, and its publisher and reviewers frame it as a screener rather than a diagnostic instrument. A question about reasoning ability needs a different instrument with its own norms. For adults 18 and older, the RIOT IQ test, the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test, was developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne. It includes 15 subtests across six cognitive indices (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, standard-deviation-15 scale. It is a measure of general cognitive ability, and it does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation of the kind the TOSWRF-2 is part of.

1. PRO-ED. (2014). TOSWRF-2: Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency–Second Edition, Complete Kit [product page]. proedinc.com

2. Western Psychological Services. (n.d.). (TOSWRF-2) Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency, Second Edition [product page]. wpspublish.com

3. Wissinger, D. R., Truckenmiller, A. J., Konek, A. E., & Ciullo, S. (2023). The validity of two tests of silent reading fluency: A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing Quarterly. doi.org

4. Gamse, B. C., Jacob, R. T., Horst, M., Boulay, B., & Unlu, F. (2008). Reading First Impact Study final report (NCEE 2009-4038). National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences. ies.ed.gov

5. Williams, A., & Bell, S. M. (2005). Test review: Mather, N., Hammill, D. D., Allen, E. A., & Roberts, R. (2004). Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 23(2), 182–188. eric.ed.gov

6. Ferrer, E., Shaywitz, B. A., Holahan, J. M., Marchione, K., & Shaywitz, S. E. (2010). Uncoupling of reading and IQ over time: Empirical evidence for a definition of dyslexia. Psychological Science, 21(1), 93–101. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Hero photo: Silhouette of a child reading a book at sunset. Photo by Aaron Burden, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (cropped).