Scores from computer-based tests are increasingly used to inform a variety of school- and student-level decisions. An underlying assumption is that the associated scores represent effortful responding by each student with respect to the tasks presented. An innovative method for examining evidence for this assumption involves an examination of item…

This study aims to determine the levels of reading comprehension and morphological awareness in middle school students and to examine the dimensions of these two concepts by illustrating the existence of a relationship between them. The study group of the research conducted with the relational screening model consists of 1561 students in the 5th,…

Reading proficiency is crucial to academic success across all content areas. This study takes a close look at student reading achievement over the course of one full school year and the impact that the quality of teacher-student interactions have on student reading growth at the middle school level. The middle school level students participating…

Many adolescents struggle with reading comprehension, despite an emphasis on reading instruction over recent decades. Evidence suggests that informational text is particularly challenging for students. To implement assessments within a multi-tiered framework, schools must have psychometrically adequate tools. Using data of 473 students in Grades 6…

Home language (HL) effects on academic language literacy have been extensively discussed. However, previous research has mostly focused on Indo--European languages. This study extends the literature by using data (n = 17,600) collected in a diversified language area: Guangxi, China. We examined the effects of four HLs and four socioeconomic…

This paper reports on the reading motivation and reading activity of 402, urban, Namibian learners in 6 schools in the central region of Namibia. From the fourth grade these Grade 7 learners received their instruction through the medium of English, and offered English as Second Language in addition to another Namibian language. They were enrolled…

This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the extent to which primary school text comprehension predicts mathematical word problem-solving skills in secondary school among Finnish students. The participants were 224 fourth graders (9-10 years old at the baseline). The children's text-reading fluency, text comprehension and basic calculation…

Literacy skills are critical to students' academic achievement and setting them on a path to successful high school graduation and readiness for college and careers. "Passport Reading Journeys" [TM] is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to help improve reading comprehension, vocabulary, word study, and writing skills of…

Literacy skills are critical to students' academic achievement and setting them on a path to successful high school graduation and readiness for college and careers. "Passport Reading Journeys" [TM] is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to help improve reading comprehension, vocabulary, word study, and writing skills of…

Literacy skills are critical to students' academic achievement and setting them on a path to successful high school graduation and readiness for college and careers. "Passport Reading Journeys" [TM] is a supplemental literacy curriculum designed to help improve reading comprehension, vocabulary, word study, and writing skills of…

This study focuses on the degree of influence of one individual factor, namely gender, on the level of English competence attained in two different groups of intermediate-level Catalan Spanish adolescent learners of English as a foreign language: the first group (Group A) is 1 year younger and follows formal instruction (FI) and in parallel…

This was a study of differential item functioning (DIF) for grades 4, 7, and 10 reading and mathematics items from state criterion-referenced tests. The tests were composed of multiple-choice and constructed-response items. Gender DIF was investigated using POLYSIBTEST and a Rasch procedure. The Rasch procedure flagged more items for DIF than did…

We evaluated the effects of student characteristics (sight word reading efficiency, phonological decoding, verbal knowledge, level of reading ability, grade, gender) and text features (passage difficulty, length, genre, and language and discourse attributes) on the oral reading fluency of a sample of middle-school students in Grades 6-8 (N =…

In this study, several middle school factors of students from two consecutive graduating classes were analyzed to determine what relation they had to college readiness, as measured by ACT subtest scores. The academic factors included: 8th grade EXPLORE composite score, 7th grade spring reading and math MAP scores, highest math course completed in…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the four assessments for entrance into an academic middle school gifted English program were accurately predicting success, as measured by students' grades each nine-week grading period. Some students were dismissed from the program each year because they could not maintain the required minimum average…