Assessment of language skills for upper elementary and middle schoolers is important due to the strong link between language and reading comprehension. Yet, currently few practical, reliable, valid, and instructionally informative assessments of language exist. This study provides validation evidence for Monster, P.I., which is a gamified,…

Academic language has been identified as an important focus for instructing students about the quality of written composition they need to be successful in college and career. However, the role of academic language in written composition achievement is not well understood. This study explores the role of academic language skills in students'…

Purpose: The current study takes a practical and theoretically grounded look at assessment of morphological knowledge and its potential to deepen understanding of how morphological knowledge supports reading comprehension for students with limited reading vocabulary. Specifically, we explore how different morphological skills support reading…

This study examined the dimensionality of morphological knowledge. The performance of 371 seventh- and eighth-graders on seven morphological knowledge tasks was investigated using confirmatory factor analysis. Results suggested that morphological knowledge was best fit by a bifactor model with a general factor of morphological knowledge and seven…

This study examined the contributions of vocabulary and spelling to the reading comprehension of students in grades 6-10 who were and were not classified as English language learners. Results indicate that vocabulary accounted for greater between-grade differences and unique variance (?R[superscript 2] = 0.11-0.31) in comprehension as compared to…

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the extent to which students who took a computer adaptive test of reading comprehension accounting for testlet effects were administered fewer passages and had a more precise estimate of their reading comprehension ability compared to students in the control condition. A randomized controlled…

We report results from two studies on the underlying dimensions of morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge in elementary-aged children. In Study 1, 99 fourth-grade students were given multiple measures of morphological awareness and vocabulary. A single factor accounted for individual differences in all morphology and vocabulary…

The 2001 authorization of the No Child Left Behind Act and its standards and accountability requirements generated interest among state education agencies in Florida, Mississippi, and North Carolina, which are served by the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, in monitoring changes in student reading and math proficiency at the school level.…

This study explored the relationship between the reading ability and science achievement of students in grades 5, 8, and 9. Reading ability was assessed with four measures: word recognition, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and comprehension (23% of all passages were on science topics). Science achievement was assessed with state…

This study examined whether the type of prompt or the method of passage reading had an effect on the retell performance of 6th-8th graders randomly assigned to one of four retell testing conditions. Both the type of prompt and the use of follow-up prompting were significantly related to the percentage of predetermined idea units retold. Effect…

The purpose of this project was to examine group- and individual-level responses by struggling adolescents readers (6th-8th grades; N = 155) to three different modalities of the same reading program, Reading Achievement Multi-Component Program. The three modalities differ in the combination of reading components (phonological decoding, spelling,…

In this study, the authors examined the validity of a holistically scored retell within a confirmatory factor analysis framework by comparing the fit of a three-factor model of reading with the data from a diverse sample of seventh and eighth graders. The final model demonstrated adequate fit, [chi][squared](32) = 97.316; comparative fit index =…