In 1981, a scale, the Emergent Reading Ability Judgments for Dictated and Handwritten Stories, was developed for use in assessing how close a child was to reading independently based upon the nature of the child's attempts to read from dictated and handwritten stories. A study was conducted to apply the scale to stories from a new sample of children whose overall emergent reading abilities were ascertained by other techniques. The question addressed was whether the scale covers the reading attempts of these children. Subjects for the study were nine kindergarten children who fell into high, moderate, or low emergent reading ability groupings. The children's own dictated and handwritten stories comprised the materials used for reading attempts. Findings showed that the scale could be applied to repeated reading attempts of kindergarten children. Further analysis indicated that the scale discriminated between groups of children who differed in overall emergent abilities. There was also a trend in the data for children to improve across time. In addition, the scale showed moderate and, in two of three instances, significant ability to rank subjects similarly across dictated and handwritten forms within a given trial. Finally, even though the two measures were devised upon different bases for different purposes, the scale and a traditional readiness test also tended to rank children similarly. (HOD)