What is the TPRI? The Texas Primary Reading Inventory explained

The TPRI, or Texas Primary Reading Inventory, is an early reading assessment for kindergarten through third grade that a classroom teacher gives to one student at a time. It is published by the Children's Learning Institute at UTHealth Houston and is jointly owned with the Texas Education Agency. The TPRI is not an IQ test. It measures specific reading skills such as letter sounds, blending, word reading, fluency and comprehension, and it marks each skill as "Developed" or "Still Developing" so the teacher can plan instruction. It produces no IQ score, no percentile rank and no diagnosis. Below: what the TPRI contains, how it is scored, its status on the Texas approved list for 2026-27, the Spanish companion Tejas LEE, and how a reading inventory differs from a measure of intelligence.

The Children's Learning Institute describes the TPRI as "a highly reliable early reading assessment designed to identify the reading development of students in kindergarten through third grade." It is administered one-on-one by the student's own teacher rather than by a psychologist or diagnostician, and it is given three times a year: beginning, middle and end of year.

At every grade level the instrument has two parts. The "Screening Section" is a brief set of tasks meant, in the publisher's words, "to predict for teachers which of their students may need additional or intensive reading instruction." The "Inventory Section" is longer and shows which skills a child has and has not yet developed.

The inventory strands listed by the Children's Learning Institute are:

• Book and print awareness: kindergarten only; whether a child understands how print works.

• Phonemic awareness: kindergarten and grade 1; hearing and manipulating the individual sounds in spoken words.

• Graphophonemic knowledge: kindergarten through grade 3; connecting letters and letter patterns to sounds, including spelling tasks.

• Word reading: reading individual words in isolation.

• Reading accuracy and fluency: grades 1 to 3; how accurately and how quickly a child reads a short story aloud.

• Listening and reading comprehension: stories are read to kindergartners and read by older students, followed by questions.

The screening tasks are letter sound, blending onset-rimes and phonemes, and word reading, given at the beginning and end of kindergarten and grade 1 and only at the beginning of grades 2 and 3. EdInstruments, a database maintained by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, lists administration at roughly 10 to 30 minutes in kindergarten, 10 to 45 minutes in grade 1 and 10 to 15 minutes in grades 2 and 3. Our explainer on what DIBELS measures describes a screener that covers similar skills with timed probes.

The TPRI does not report a total score. Each task is scored either "Developed" (D) or "Still Developing" (SD). On the inventory, a task counts as Developed when the child answers a set number of items correctly, for example 4 of 5 or 8 of 10, and "Branching Rules" then tell the teacher which task to give next. The Teacher's Guide is explicit that this is an instructional tool: "SD does not equal F. There are no failing and passing scores on the TPRI." Students are not expected to score Developed at every wave, because the beginning-of-year administration deliberately samples skills taught later in the year.

The TPRI is "criterion-referenced," meaning each task is judged against a fixed skill standard rather than against other children. The guide states that the TPRI "is not a norm-referenced instrument, so the stories do not have grade equivalents or percentile ranks." The screening cut-points came from what the publisher describes as "a longitudinal database of Texas students," and the guide adds that the screening "is not a placement instrument, nor is it intended to replace the need for further evaluation of students who may need special services."

For fluency, the guide gives rough end-of-year rates rather than norms: about 60 words correct per minute for a fluent first grader, about 90 for a second grader and about 120 for a third grader. Each kit also includes an Intervention Activities Guide with "hundreds of activities" keyed to the skill strands.

Barbara Foorman's curriculum vitae identifies her, together with Jack Fletcher and David Francis, as developer of the TPRI from 1998 onward, with Texas Education Agency contracts in 1997-98 and 1998-99 to revise, validate and build items for it. The current print edition carries a 2010 copyright held by the Texas Education Agency and The University of Texas System, and the Teacher's Guide describes it as "the product of more than 10 years of development and studies conducted with more than 15,000 Texas students."

Independent peer-reviewed evidence is thinner than for some national screeners. In Assessment for Effective Intervention, Jason Nelson examined the kindergarten mid-year screeners of the 2004-2006 edition with 180 students and reported adequate internal consistency reliability and adequate concurrent and predictive validity for screening purposes. His classification analysis found low false negative rates and high negative predictive power, meaning the screener rarely missed a child who later struggled, alongside substantial false positive rates and low positive predictive power, meaning many flagged children went on to read adequately. He recommended using the TPRI within a response-to-intervention model. That profile is typical of brief reading screeners, which are tuned to avoid missing struggling readers at the cost of over-flagging, and it is one reason no single TPRI administration should be treated as a diagnosis.

Yes, for the 2026-27 school year, with changes coming. In a January 29, 2026 letter to administrators, the Texas Education Agency announced that it had "extended the authorization period for commissioner-approved reading instruments through August 2027." For grades 1 and 2, the letter states that "TPRI/Tejas LEE and mCLASS Texas by Amplify will also remain available as free, commissioner-approved reading instruments." For kindergarten, the approved readiness instruments are Circle Kindergarten Progress Monitoring (formerly TX-KEA) and mCLASS Texas. The agency also notes that the TPRI and Tejas LEE are "supported by multiple vendors, including CLI, Amira, and Tango Software; only the CLI version is offered at no cost."

The larger shift comes from House Bill 2 of the 89th Texas Legislature, which added Texas Education Code section 28.0063. The agency explains that the statute requires a new commissioner's list of foundational literacy and numeracy instruments for kindergarten through grade 3, expected ahead of the 2027-28 school year, after which districts must select only from that list. The request for instruments was posted on March 6, 2026, with a 2026-27 pilot year and publication planned for spring 2027 to cover 2027-28 through 2030-31. Whether the TPRI will appear on the new list is not yet public. For now, the Children's Learning Institute hosts the grade 1 and 2 editions on CLI Engage at no cost to Texas public districts and charter schools.

Tejas LEE is the Spanish-language counterpart to the TPRI for students in kindergarten through grade 3 who are taught to read in Spanish. It is the intellectual property of the University of Houston System and the Texas Education Agency, and, like the TPRI, it is given by the teacher three times a year with branching rules that direct the next task from the student's scores. The Children's Learning Institute notes one structural difference: "Tejas LEE does not have a screening section." The Tejas LEE administration guide also observes that students in ESL programs may be exempted from an English instrument if their English proficiency is not sufficient to yield reliable and valid results. The PALS literacy screener used in Virginia follows a similar English-plus-Spanish pattern.

Parents sometimes wonder whether "Still Developing" on a TPRI report says something about their child's intelligence. It does not.

• Different construct: the TPRI measures taught reading skills at a point in time. An IQ test measures general cognitive ability across reasoning, vocabulary, spatial and memory tasks that do not depend on being able to decode print.

• Different scale: the TPRI reports Developed or Still Developing per task with no norms, no percentile and no composite. An IQ test reports "standard scores" on a scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, based on a representative norm sample.

• Different purpose: a screener is tuned to over-flag rather than miss children, as Nelson's data showed. An IQ score estimates a stable trait and carries a confidence interval rather than a cut-point.

• Different administrator: the TPRI is a teacher tool for grouping and instruction. Individually administered IQ tests are given by trained examiners, and any diagnosis of a reading disability belongs to a qualified clinician.

Reading difficulty and general ability are related but distinct: a child can score well on a cognitive test while still needing structured phonics work, or the reverse. Our article on whether dyslexia affects IQ test results covers that relationship in more depth.

For adults who want a normed measure of reasoning rather than reading, the RIOT IQ test, developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne, is the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test for people 18 and older. It contains 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 mean-100, standard-deviation-15 scale. It does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation, and it is not designed for children. One instrument samples broad cognitive ability against adult norms; the TPRI checks whether a six-year-old can blend "c-a-t." You can learn more or take the test at riotiq.com.

No. It is a criterion-referenced reading inventory that reports whether specific skills are Developed or Still Developing, with no IQ score, percentile rank or composite.

The student's classroom teacher, one student at a time. Training and a user guide are available on CLI Engage.

Roughly 10 to 30 minutes in kindergarten, 10 to 45 in grade 1 and 10 to 15 in grades 2 and 3, according to EdInstruments, depending on how much of the inventory is needed.

For 2026-27 the Texas Education Agency lists the TPRI and Tejas LEE, alongside mCLASS Texas, as free commissioner-approved reading instruments for grades 1 and 2. A new K-3 list is expected in spring 2027 for use from 2027-28.

The child has not yet shown mastery of that skill at that point in the year. The Teacher's Guide states that there are no passing or failing scores.

The Spanish-language companion to the TPRI for students taught to read in Spanish. It has an inventory section only, with no screening section.

1. Children's Learning Institute at UTHealth Houston. (n.d.). TPRI early reading assessment. childrenslearninginstitute.org

2. Children's Learning Institute at UTHealth Houston. (2026). TPRI and Tejas LEE. CLI Engage. public.cliengage.org

3. Texas Education Agency. (2026, January 29). HB 2 implementation: Foundational literacy and numeracy instruments and extension of current K-2 reading instruments [To the Administrator Addressed letter]. tea.texas.gov

4. Texas Education Agency. (2026). Call for K-3 literacy and numeracy instruments. tea.texas.gov

5. Texas Education Agency and The University of Texas System. (2010). TPRI teacher's guide [Sampler excerpt]. Brookes Publishing. brookespublishing.com

6. Nelson, J. M. (2009). Psychometric properties of the Texas Primary Reading Inventory for early reading screening in kindergarten. Assessment for Effective Intervention, 35(1), 45-53. doi.org

7. Foorman, B. R. (2023). Curriculum vitae. Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State University. fcrr.org

8. EdInstruments, Annenberg Institute at Brown University. (n.d.). Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI). edinstruments.org

Hero photo: A guest reader shows a picture book to a class of young pupils. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Darren Scott, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).