In sociolinguistic contexts where standardized languages coexist with regional dialects, the study of differential item functioning is a valuable tool for examining certain linguistic uses or varieties as threats to score validity. From an ecological perspective, this paper describes three stages in the study of differential item functioning…

International large-scale assessments have gained much attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century, influencing education legislation in many countries. This includes Spain, where they have been used by successive governments to justify education policy change. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the PISA 2018 reading scores for…

Stagnant standardized test scores keep literacy achievement at the forefront of national education discussions. Increased conversations about the science of reading have propelled investigations into different types of phonics instruction. However, questions still linger such as "Which strategies are most effective for which students?",…

This study examined the role of fidelity in the reading outcomes within a Tier 2 intervention implemented by Spanish kindergarten and first grade school teachers. For this purpose, differences in reading performance growth were analyzed among at-risk students who received a Tier 2 intervention with high fidelity, at-risk students who received the…

Introduction: Teachers and researchers often need to evaluate word decoding skill in groupwise and in a short time. The LEO-1-min test is created to measure word reading through a lexical decision procedure where the examinee identifies pseudowords in a list of frequent words. Objetive: To examine the reliability and validity of LEO-1-min, a…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…

Automated summary evaluation is proposed as an alternative to rubrics and multiple-choice tests in knowledge assessment. Inbuilt rubric is a recent Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) method that implements rubrics in an artificially-generated semantic space. It was compared with classical LSA's cosine-based methods assessing knowledge in a…

Background: Detecting reading comprehension difficulties is challenging because many factors are involved in comprehension ability. Various reading comprehension tests can be used to detect difficulties but often do not yield the same results. Method: Our aim was to analyse the agreement between three commonly used standardised reading…

This study investigates the provision of two types of auditory elaborative automated digital feedback (metalinguistic and informational) in the context of a digital game for reading skills development in English as a foreign language. Nineteen 11-year-old Spanish-Catalan school children played through two digital minigames while their…

This article examines the question of teacher quality and its effects on the skills acquisition of primary school students in Spain. We use an education production function in which we incorporate teachers' fixed effects, estimated by means of a multiple regression model. Specifically, we examine the acquisition of reading skills by drawing on…

Repeated viewing of the same video is a common strategy among autonomous language learners as well as a much used pedagogical strategy among foreign language (FL) teachers. Learners may watch the same video more than once, to increase global comprehension of the target language or to focus their attention on linguistic aspects, such as new…

It has long been thought that encouraging children to read is likely to be beneficial for the development of their literacy skills. However, a lot less attention has been paid to the issue of whether what students read matters for their academic progress. This paper therefore considers the association between the frequency young people read five…

Introduction: Students usually answer comprehension questions from texts as part of their academic activities. Elaborated Feedback (EF) has been found to be relatively effective to improve comprehension and learning from texts. However, there is little research on how computer-based feedback influences the question-answering process. This study…

Background: Research has suggested that one of the most important variables for the development of reading comprehension is the home literacy environment, composed of the literacy interface and what is known as the limiting environment. The current study investigated Spanish children's reading comprehension in relation to these two dimensions.…

The effect of composition may be strong in systems where students are systematically sorted based on their socio-economic background. This paper aims to model the differential effect of class composition on pupils' achievement in Belgium (French-speaking Community), France, Spain and Portugal. Multilevel models are consequently tested on the…