Dr. Roger Farr has been working on reading assessment for over 40 years. He is the senior author of the Iowa Silent Reading Test, and the senior reading author for four editions of the Metropolitan Achievement tests. He has also been a contributor to the development of the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as a consultant to several state departments of education in the development of state reading assessments. His most recent test is READS. Dr. Farr believes that READS is a powerful test that provides three vital scores to help teachers plan effective instruction. The first is a functional reading level score which is based on the concept of an informal reading inventory; the second are reading skill and strategy scores that help teachers focus on the most important skill and strategy needs for each student. These scores not only indicate what needs to be taught, but they specify whether instruction needs to be introduced, practiced, or applied. Finally, READS provides an excellent scaled score scale so teachers and administrators can reliably and validly determine student growth from grade to grade and not merely from the beginning of one grade to the end of that grade.

Dr. Farr has conducted hundreds of workshops and seminars with teachers through the years focusing on the teaching of reading with an emphasis on the use of think along strategies. His modeling, coaching, and reflection model to develop better comprehenders has been adopted in many schools and applied in numerous reading programs. Most notable of these applications has been in the development of Power Up! Building Reading Strategies. Dr. Farr has developed effective and easy-to-use strategies for both teaching and learning reading comprehension.

A teacher of kindergarten through graduate school, Dr. Farr is a senior author of Signatures, Collections, and Story Town, K–6 reading programs from Harcourt School and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers. He also serves as a special consultant to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on assessment and measurement. He is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus and Former Director of the Center for Innovation in Assessment at Indiana University. For twelve years Dr. Farr served as the editor of the Reading Research Quarterly, one of the premier research journals in education. Dr. Farr is a former president of the International Reading Association. In 1984, the IRA honored Dr. Farr for outstanding lifetime contributions to the teaching of reading. That same year, he was elected to the IRA Reading Hall of Fame, and in 1988, he was selected by the IRA as the Outstanding Reading Teacher Educator.