Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

A cluster randomized design was used to investigate effects of the Story Friends vocabulary curriculum on learning of 84 preschoolers in 24 classrooms who were at risk for language difficulties. Children in the treatment condition received explicit vocabulary instruction of 36 words during small-group storybook listening centers with extended…

Purpose: We examined whether diverse profiles of strengths and weaknesses would emerge when assessing different aspects of morphological awareness in first- through sixth-grade students using a recently developed standardized test, the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and Spelling (MATRS; Apel et al., 2021). Method: Four thousand…

The rising demand for dual-language immersion (DLI) programs, which offer core instruction in two languages from early grades onward, has raised questions about program design and access. We leverage the rapid expansion of DLI schools across the U.S. state of Utah to estimate effects of DLI program availability on the academic achievement of…

To account for natural variability in cognitive processing, it is standard practice to optimize a model's parameters by fitting it to behavioral data. Although most language-related theories acknowledge a large role for experience in language processing, variability reflecting that knowledge is usually ignored when evaluating a model's fit to…

Purpose: Our aim was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the online administered format of the Test of Narrative Language--Second Edition (TNL-2; Gillam & Pearson, 2017), given the importance of assessing children's narrative ability and considerable absence of psychometric studies of spoken language assessments administered online.…

The history of vocabulary research has specified a rich and complex construct, resulting in calls for vocabulary research, assessment, and instruction to take into account the complex problem space of vocabulary. At the intersection of vocabulary theory and assessment modeling, this paper suggests a suite of modeling techniques that model the…

The authors describe Monster, PI, which is an app-based, gamified assessment that measures language skills (knowledge of morphology, vocabulary, and syntax) of students in grades 5-8 and provides teachers with interpretable score reports to drive instruction that improves vocabulary, reading, and writing ability. Specifically, the authors describe…

Nearly two dozen states now administer online exams to deliver testing to K-12 students. These tests have real consequences: their results feed into accountability systems, which have been used for more than a decade to hold schools and districts accountable for their students' learning. We examine the rollout of computer-based testing in…

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…

More than 40 percent of students in California's public schools speak a language other than English at home. In the 2016-17 school year, 21 percent of all students, or more than 1.3 million, were English Learners (ELs). When former English Learners are included, the population of "ever ELs" expands to 38 percent of all K-12 students in…

Learning to read English requires learning the complex statistical dependencies between orthography and phonology. Previous research has focused on how these statistics are learned in neural network models provided with as much training as needed. Children, however, are expected to acquire this knowledge in a few years of school with only limited…

The limited research available on writing in Grade 1 led to the development and implementation of an intervention for students who were performing below expectations. Ten students participated in a writing intervention for 11-13 weeks. A multiple baseline design across three units of instruction was focused on (a) paragraph structure, (b) sentence…

The goal of this study was to assess the relationships between computational approaches to analyzing constructed responses made during reading and individual differences in the foundational skills of reading in college readers. We also explored if these relationships were consistent across texts and samples collected at different institutions and…

Despite research demonstrating the importance of mathematics achievement to children's educational success and trajectories, many children enter kindergarten without the foundational mathematics skills needed to succeed (Garcia & Weiss, 2015). Children's executive function (EF) skills and their learning-related behaviors (Anthony & Ogg,…