The CTOPP -2 (conversationally referred to and pronounced as the “See Top”) is a test that any reading teacher must know about. Its scores offer detailed information about a student’s phonological awareness and rapid naming skills, which are two skills that are often weak in struggling readers, including those with dyslexia. If a student is struggling with early reading skills and you want to know why, the CTOPP-2 is likely to reveal part of the puzzle.
Who is this blog post for?
- Special education teachers and private reading tutors: you’ll improve your ability to identify students with specific learning disabilities and dyslexia. You’ll understand how to use CTOPP-2 results to guide your specialized instruction.
- Parents who are concerned about your child’s reading or spelling: this blog will help you understand why phonological awareness and rapid naming need to be assessed as part of a comprehensive academic evaluation. You’ll feel confident advocating for your child and asking for these skills to be assessed by the school district.
- Classroom teachers, reading interventionists, and administrators: you’ll learn the importance of evaluating phonological awareness and rapid naming. You’ll also gain insight that will help you understand evaluation reports that include CTOPP-2 results.
What is the CTOPP-2 and what is it used for?
The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, Second Edition (CTOPP-2) is a standardized, norm-referenced test that measures phonological processing abilities related to reading.
The publishers note that there are four primary purposes for administering the CTOPP-2:
- to identify individuals whose phonological processing abilities are significantly below their peers
- to identify strengths and weaknesses among the individual’s phonological processing skills
- to monitor progress in students who are receiving intervention for reading weaknesses
- as a measurement device in research studies that investigate phonological processing abilities
The first three purposes align with the goals of many school evaluation teams. While achievement testing can tell us what general literacy skills a child is struggling with, it cannot tell us why. Cognitive testing may offer insights into why a student struggles, but the contribution of an assessment of rapid naming and phonological awareness is invaluable. The importance of assessing phonological awareness and rapid naming is beyond the scope of this post, but be sure to bookmark this blog if you want to brush up on your knowledge.
What age range is the CTOPP-2 for?
The CTOPP-2 is for students aged four years old through adulthood.
What does it mean if a student does poorly on the CTOPP-2?
The child may need remediation in early literacy skills. The evaluation team should consider the results of the CTOPP-2 alongside the results of the achievement testing and the cognitive testing. The team may also wish to complete a diagnostic test, such as the WIST, to determine which skills the student has mastered and which skills the student needs to learn.
As I’m sure you know, structured literacy is the way to go with reading intervention! We can improve phonological awareness through instruction. Remember that phonemic awareness is most effective when taught with letters, like when completing word chains. Although there is no known intervention that can directly improve rapid naming skills, research has found that rapid naming skills can improve indirectly as a result of improvement in other basic reading skills, such as phonological awareness. A quality literacy program based on structured literacy principles will accomplish all of this and more.
Why should I give the CTOPP-2 in addition to an academic achievement test like the WIAT, WJ, or KTEA?
A thorough special education eligibility evaluation will certainly include an achievement test like the WIAT, WJ, or KTEA. These tests are essential for measuring a student’s academic skills, but they don’t always give the full picture, especially when reading difficulties are a concern. That’s why I always include the CTOPP-2 when I’m investigating a reading weakness.
The CTOPP-2 is an efficient way to assess two foundational reading skills: phonological processing and rapid naming. These are areas where struggling readers (including many students with dyslexia) often show weaknesses. Although the WIAT-4 now includes a phonological processing subtest, the CTOPP-2 provides a more detailed view, and it adds rapid naming as well.
With just one additional tool and one report template, I can gather valuable data on two critical components of early reading development. If you’re not yet familiar with how phonological processing and rapid naming support foundational literacy development, I recommend reading this blog post first and then coming back here to learn more about the CTOPP-2.
Let’s take a quick detour to sum up phonological awareness and rapid naming!
While we can’t go into great depth in this blog, here’s an overview of these two skills that are highly correlated with early literacy problems.
Phonological awareness tasks include the ability to rhyme words and to segment, blend, isolate, count, and manipulate sounds within words. These skills typically develop naturally in young children, but they must be explicitly taught to children who do not develop them. The tasks are solely auditory and do not take any visual representations of words or sounds into account. In order to read and spell the sounds within written words, children must be able to recognize and manipulate the sounds within spoken words. A child’s phonological awareness is the ability that is most closely related to his or her reading success.
Let’s also touch on Phonological Processing, since that term is used in the name of the CTOPP-2. Phonological processing is a broader category that includes the skills mentioned above, as well as phonological working memory and phonological retrieval. These skills are required to recall and repeat auditory information, like phone numbers, nonsense words, and multisyllabic words.
Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is the ability to rapidly name familiar objects and symbols. Naming-speed tests, particularly for letters and numbers, provide one of the best means of differentiating good and poor readers and predicting reading fluency.
Is the CTOPP-2 a valid and reliable measure of student achievement?
Yes. It was normed on 1,900 individuals ranging in age from 6 through 24 years. The publisher notes that the individuals were carefully selected to represent the demographic characteristics of the U.S. population. This means that the CTOPP-2 was designed to provide accurate and consistent results across diverse populations. Its standardization ensures that the test measures what it claims to measure—students’ phonological processing and rapid naming skills—while accounting for variations in age, geography, and educational backgrounds. For research lovers, additional information about the test’s reliability can be found here.
Who can administer the CTOPP-2?
The publishers recommend that individuals who administer the CTOPP-2 have “extensive formal training in assessment” that leads to an understanding of “test statistics, general procedures governing test administration, scoring, and interpretation, and specific information about phonological ability testing.”
The CTOPP-2 is admittedly a bit harder to administer than some other tests, like the WIST or the WIAT. It will take some time and effort to become comfortable managing your examiner record book, the student materials, a timer, and the audio files. In my opinion, you will be successful if:
- You are passionate about reading and understand how phonological processing impacts reading skills.
- You are experienced in administering other formal assessments.
- You are willing to read the manual before testing.
- You make time to practice administering the test before officially administrating it.
If possible, observe a coworker who is comfortable administering the test and ask them to observe you administering it with a practice student.
How long does it take to administer the CTOPP-2?
The manual suggests planning for thirty minutes to complete the entire battery, and that the assessment can usually be completed in one testing session. In my experience, many students quickly become mentally fatigued and have difficulty sustaining their attention. The manual assures us that testing across several sessions is acceptable and that the student should be evaluated “under optimal circumstances.” If my student cannot maintain focus, I will discontinue testing for either a short break to refocus or to begin again on a different day.
What are the subtests?
There are 13 subtests that combine to measure several composite scores: Phonological Awareness, Phonological Memory, Rapid Symbolic Naming (or Rapid Non-Symbolic Naming for younger students), and Alternative Phonological Awareness. Read on for a brief description of the tasks included in each composite cluster.
Phonological Awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of and ability to access the sound structure of oral language. This cluster is a combination of:
- Elision (saying a word after dropping designated sounds)
- Blending Words (combining sounds to form words)
- Phoneme Isolation (identifying target sounds in words)
Phonological Memory refers to the process of coding information phonologically for temporary storage in working memory or short-term memory. This cluster is a combination of:
- Memory for Digits (repeat a series of numbers ranging in length from two to eight digits)
- Nonword Repetition (repeating nonwords that range in length from 3 to 15 sounds)
Rapid Symbolic Naming is the ability to retrieve phonological information from long-term memory. These tasks require speed and effective processing of both visual and phonological information. This cluster is a combination of:
- Rapid Digit Naming (speed of naming numbers)
- Rapid Letter Naming (speed of naming letters)
Rapid Non-Symbolic Naming is an option for younger students who are not yet able to name letters and numbers with accuracy. You can administer it to students between the ages of 4 and 6. Students complete Rapid Object Naming and Rapid Color Naming tasks rather than letter and number naming tasks. The subtests in this cluster offer a way to investigate the presence of dyslexia in students at the pre-reading stage.
Alternative Phonological Awareness reflects performance on two supplemental subtests:
- Blending Nonwords (combining speech sounds to make nonwords)
- Segmenting Nonwords (say the separate sounds that make up a nonword)
The ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in nonwords is an important skill because reading unfamiliar words requires a child to apply known rules to a word that is not already stored in their bank of words that are automatically recognized, either visually or auditorily.
What scores will I get?
The CTOPP-2 provides age equivalents, grade equivalents, percentile ranks, subtest scaled scores, composite scores, and developmental scores.
Norms for the CTOPP-2 subtests have a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 3. On subtest scores, children whose scores fall within the Average range have a scaled score of 8-12. Composite scores are based on a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Children whose scores fall within the Average range have a composite score of 90-110.
How do you administer the test?
Because the administration is somewhat complex, I’ll just mention some key points here.
- You must administer all portions of the test individually.
- A quiet setting is absolutely necessary. If you share space with another teacher, you’ll want to arrange for a time when there are no distractions in the testing setting. Even a noisy air vent can make this test tricky to administer!
- You need a way to play the audio files. This might mean using a CD player, playing a CD on your computer, or using digital audio files, which are available for download here.
- You need a reliable timer or stopwatch handy.
How do you score the CTOPP-2?
Raw scores are converted using the tables in the manual. For most subtests, the raw score is the number of items answered correctly before reaching the ceiling. For the rapid naming tasks, the raw score is the number of seconds it took for the student to complete the task.
Are there any downsides to this test?
Yes, but don’t let these prevent you from becoming familiar with it. First, it can be mentally taxing for students to complete the tasks. Next, it can be challenging to locate a quiet, distraction-free testing setting. Another downside is the potentially steep learning curve as you familiarize yourself with the contents and procedures of the testing. However, the information you’ll gain about your students will outweigh these inconveniences!
Lastly, it is important to note that the CTOPP-2 is not a comprehensive assessment of reading skills. This is not necessarily a downside if you recognize it from the beginning. Depending upon the purpose of your evaluation, you will need to administer other assessments in addition to the CTOPP-2. When I worked in a public school, I always tried to administer the CTOPP-2 in combination with an achievement test like the WIAT-4, and the school psychologist would complete cognitive testing with a test like the WISC-V. As a private practitioner, I now like to administer the CTOPP-2 with the WIST. The WIST can tell me what skills a child is struggling with, while the CTOPP-2 can offer insight into why the child is struggling.
How can I purchase the CTOPP-2?
You can purchase the CTOPP-2 from Pro-Ed or other publisher websites, typically for around $400. (This price is accurate at the time of publishing.) You can also check marketplaces like eBay, Mercari, Facebook Marketplace, or Facebook groups for reading tutors. Some people have luck borrowing the testing kit from local teachers, trainers, or colleges. Make sure you get the second edition so you are using the updated norms!
Using the CTOPP-2 to identify students before they struggle
One effective use of the CTOPP-2 is to identify students at risk for future reading problems. For example, if an older sibling has dyslexia and their parents want to intervene early for a younger sibling, the CTOPP-2 can help. Even if the younger sibling is in preschool, the results of the CTOPP-2 can help the family determine if the younger sibling needs a more robust early literacy program due to weaknesses in phonological awareness or rapid naming.
Let’s say an older sibling is identified with dyslexia, the preschool-aged sibling does poorly on the CTOPP-2, and their school district is using a balanced literacy approach. Uh oh! The parents should be strongly encouraged to advocate for a structured literacy approach for both siblings!
Putting the CTOPP-2 Into Perspective
Whether you’re preparing to administer the CTOPP-2 yourself or simply want to make sense of the scores in a student’s evaluation report, having a solid understanding of what this test measures and why it matters can make all the difference. I hope this post gave you the clarity and context you need to interpret CTOPP-2 results with greater confidence!
