Diagnostic assessments are designed to assess which of the following?

Diagnostic assessments are specifically aimed at evaluating particular skills or components of reading. This targeted evaluation helps educators identify students' strengths and weaknesses in reading. By focusing on specific areas such as phonemic awareness, decoding, comprehension, and fluency, these assessments provide detailed insights into a student's reading abilities. This information is crucial for tailoring instruction to meet individual student needs, ensuring that interventions can be appropriately designed and implemented to support each learner’s growth in reading proficiency.

In contrast, other options do not align with the primary intention of diagnostic assessments. While reading fluency and general academic performance are important, they represent broader or more generalized areas of assessment rather than the focused diagnostic purpose. Additionally, social-emotional development is outside the scope of reading diagnostics; it pertains instead to a different aspect of student development that would typically be assessed separately.