Students in grades 3-6 need to use increasingly sophisticated comprehension skills and strategies as they read and build knowledge across disciplinary content areas. Grounded in research, this book presents effective practices for integrating literacy instruction with literature, science, and social studies. Chapters address text selection,…

High-quality measurement tools are critical to school improvement efforts. Education researchers frequently employ surveys in order to assess a host of variables associated with school improvement. This article asserts that Rasch modeling techniques enhance the quality of a measurement tool because they comprise elements of both qualitative and…

An increasing number of parents are opting-out their children from high-stakes. Accountability systems in education have used students' test scores to measure student learning, teacher effectiveness, and school district performance. Students who are opted-out of high-stakes tests are not being evaluated by the state tests, making their level of…

This article reviews the development of a qualitative summative assessment based on the National Theater Standards to evaluate theater education classes. The authors examine the current state of the field of theater education; the use of the assessment; an overview of the results of an arts integration U.S. Department of Education project; and a…

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of 0.90 and 0.80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written…

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of 0.90 and 0.80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how well a kindergarten dynamic assessment of decoding predicts future reading difficulty at 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade and to determine whether the dynamic assessment improves the predictive validity of traditional static kindergarten reading measures. Method: With a small variation in sample…

We assessed the simple view of reading as a framework for Grade 3 reading comprehension in two ways. We first confirmed that a structural equation model in which word recognition, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension were assessed by multiple measures to inform each latent construct provided an adequate fit to this model in Grade 3.…

The purpose of this qualitative, descriptive case study was to explore how principals, teachers, and instructional specialists (in small rural communities) perceive the influence of principal leadership style on teacher capacity, motivation, and setting, and the subsequent influence on student achievement in northern Arizona. The study sample was…

Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) Science for use with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) assessments are available for the 2016-17 school year. These new assessments measure student growth toward understanding of the multidimensional NGSS performance expectations. This report presents MAP Science for use with NGSS by presenting and…

The present study examined the technical adequacy of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) measure of early numeracy for kindergarten through third grade students. Our CBM measures were developed to reflect broad and theoretically derived categories of mathematical thinking: quick retrieval, written computation, and number sense. The mastery of these…

Few Spanish language tools are available for assessing important social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. The present study presents evidence of the psychometric properties of a Spanish-language version of SELweb (SELweb-S), a web-based system for assessing children's ability to recognize others' emotions and perspectives, solve social problems,…

This paper investigates the power of the computer guided clinical interview (CI) and new curriculum based measurement (CBM) measures to identify and help children at risk of low mathematics achievement. We use data from large numbers of children in Kindergarten through Grade 3 to investigate the construct validity of CBM risk categories. The basic…

As standardized assessments tied to the Common Core standards approach for K-12 students, U.S. teachers correctly feel that how we test students will change. Will students be ready for tests of proficiency done on computers? Gullen debriefed with 500 students in various grades who had just taken pilot assessment items connected to the coming…

This study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1-6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade…