Oral language skills are important to consider in school psychology practice, as they are directly tied to many areas of academic functioning. For example, research has demonstrated that oral language skills in early elementary school predict reading comprehension in later grades (Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2009). With a…

Common problems in using and scoring the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure to quantify young children's grammatic structure expressive language are reviewed. Scoring examples are provided to help clinicians learn the DDS procedure. (Author/CL)

Literature relating summarization skills to reading improvement and to test score gains is reviewed, and two new studies are reported. One study compared gain on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) of two groups of students, one (n=7 students) receiving instruction in summarizing skills and the other (n=14) receiving TOEFL…

To streamline the process of collecting spontaneous language samples, a modified format of the "Multilevel Informal Language Inventory" was administered to 150 public school children, aged four-six. Administration, scoring, and analysis required approximately 35 minutes per child. Scores obtained were used to compute normative data on a…

A study evaluated the ability of older adults to accurately perceive and retain Spanish in their short-term memory. Specifically, the study investigated differences in native language (English) auditory perception, short-term native language auditory memory capacity, monolingual age differences in auditory perception ability in an unknown…

Prochievement tests, hybrids of proficiency and achievement tests, assess students' linguistic and communicative competence and provide a means for formative evaluation of student progress. Assessing Spanish listening comprehension/speaking proficiency, creating listening/oral proficiency test formats, and scoring are described. Guidelines for…

An annotated list of tests for assessing students' learning abilities is provided in this document. Each annotation contains information that helps the educator gauge the negative and positive aspects of the tests. Information useful in understanding intelligence quotient (IQ) subscores and their implications is included. The tests described are…

Each spring the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS) battery is administered to students throughout New Mexico as part of the State Department of Education mandated assessment program. This report contains information regarding 1987 test results for Albuquerque Public School (APS) students in grades 3, 5, and 8 on the CTBS, a standardized,…