Purpose: This study investigated the reading profiles of middle school Spanish-speaking emergent bilinguals (EBs) with significantly below grade level reading comprehension and whether these profiles varied in their reading comprehension performance over time. Method: Latent profile analyses were used to classify Grade 6 and 7 Hispanic EBs (n =…

Identifying the factor structure of online reading to learn is important for the development of theory, assessment, and instruction. Traditional comprehension models have been developed from, and for, offline reading. This study used online reading to determine an optimal factor structure for modeling online research and comprehension among 426…

This longitudinal study of 78 Canadian English-speaking students examined the applicability of the stability, cumulative, and compensatory models in reading comprehension development. Archival government-mandated assessments of reading comprehension at Grades 3, 6, and 10, and the Canadian Test of Basic Skills measure of reading comprehension…

Language comprehension is crucial to reading. However, theoretical models and recent research raise questions about what constitutes this multifaceted domain. We present two related studies examining the dimensionality of language comprehension and relations to reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades. Studies 1 (Grade 6; N = 148) and…

This study investigated the role of morphological awareness weaknesses in the reading difficulties encountered by Spanish-speaking language minority learners and their native English-speaking peers in sixth grade. One hundred and thirty-eight students (82 language minority learners; 56 native English speakers) were assessed on English measures of…

Due to budget shortfalls, teacher furloughs were imposed in 2009 in Hawaii Public Schools. The furloughs resulted in a 2009-2010 school year of 167 days as opposed to the regular school year of 180 days. The purpose of this causal-comparative study with a pretest-posttest design was to examine the found effects of those furloughs on academic…

This study examined oral reading fluency (ORF) of bilingual and monolingual students. The author selected a sample of 510 (258 males and 252 females) native Arabic-speaking sixth-graders (62 bilinguals and 448 monolinguals) in Egypt. The purposes were; (a) to examine oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, prosody, and oral reading comprehension…

Over the past decade, educational policy trends have shifted to a focus on examining students' growth from kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12). One way states can track students' growth is with a vertical scale. Presently, every state that uses a vertical scale bases the scale on a unidimensional IRT model. These models make a…

Universal screening using curriculum-based measures allows educators to detect students who may be in need of instructional interventions. Curriculum-based measures, such as oral reading fluency and Maze, are effective at accurately and efficiently identifying reading proficiency levels for overall school populations. Nevertheless, little is…

Interest in Student Growth Modeling (SGM) and Value Added Modeling (VAM) arises from educators concerned with measuring the effectiveness of teaching and other school activities through changes in student performance as a companion and perhaps even an alternative to status. Several formal statistical models have been proposed for year-to-year…

The Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test was the major source of data for the Texas educational accountability system from 1994 through 2002. Contrary to critics who claim that TAAS data are invalid and unreliable measures of student performance, structural equation analyses of TAAS reading data based on the 1994 Texas third grade…

Most growth models implicitly assume that test scores have been vertically scaled. What may not be widely appreciated are the different choices that must be made when creating a vertical score scale. In this paper empirical patterns of growth in student achievement are compared as a function of different approaches to creating a vertical scale.…

All students from grades 3 through 8 were tested in the fall, winter, and spring of 2009 on passage reading fluency (PRF) measures from easyCBM [R]. Student characteristics were analyzed for influence on reading growth. The results showed the negative effects from being a male or a student of color, coming from an economically disadvantaged…