Throughout the country, state assessments in reading, mathematics, and science continue to play important roles in instructional improvement and accountability. State assessments must align to academic standards that are significantly more challenging than previous standards, reflecting the current knowledge and skill demands of postsecondary…

Assessing students' emerging literacy skills is crucial for identifying areas where a child may be falling behind and can lead directly to an increased chance of reading success. The Waterford Assessment of Core Skills (WACS), a computerized adaptive test of early literacy for students in prekindergarten through 2nd grade, addresses this need.…

The New Mexico Public Education Department developed the Kindergarten Observation Tool (KOT) as a multidimensional observational measure of students' knowledge and skills at kindergarten entry. The primary purpose of the KOT is to inform instruction, so that kindergarten teachers can use the information about their students' knowledge and skills…

Five hundred and seventeen words from the easyCBM Word Reading assessment (n = 57 kindergarten, 117 first grade, 172 second grade, and 171 third grade) were examined by 15 teachers for their correspondence with the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts. In particular, the degree of correspondence between Standard 3 ("Phonics…

The "Washington English Language Proficiency Assessment" (WELPA) is a No Child Left Behind (NCLB)-compliant instrument that is used in Grades K-12 as a formal and standardized method of measuring language proficiency. The test results provide important information for classifying English Language Learners (ELLs) and subsequently for…

In this study, we describe two studies used to select appropriate assessments to measure phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, and fluency in the Spanish language for students receiving literacy instruction in Spanish. We first describe two studies in which we use linear regression and correlations to examine the appropriateness of different…

In this technical report, the authors describe the development and piloting of reading comprehension measures as part of a comprehensive progress monitoring literacy assessment system developed in 2006 for use with students in Kindergarten through fifth grade. They begin with a brief overview of the two conceptual frameworks underlying the…

This report documents the design, development, and psychometric characteristics of the assessment instruments used in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K). The ECLS-K is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. The ECLS-K was designed to assess the…