Understanding students' progress towards meeting grade-level expectations within an academic year is the goal of many education stakeholders so that they can make decisions to adjust instruction and improve students' learning trajectories. The purpose of this study was to explore 4th and 5th grade students' progress towards meeting expectations in…

Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) has been proposed as a means to model the relation between examinee abilities and test responses. Three recent articles proved that when MIRT is used in ability estimation, an examinee's score could theoretically decrease due to a correct answer or increase due to an incorrect answer. The current…

First-grade children's reading, writing, and spelling competencies in 2 different instructional contexts for teaching phonics were examined. Reading, writing, and spelling abilities were measured at the beginning, middle, and end of 1st grade. Children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 treatments designed to teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences,…

Presents a diagnostic teaching unit designed to identify effective teaching strategies for fourth- or fifth-grade students with learning or behavior disorders. The unit uses "The Popcorn Book" (de Paola) for activities to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching strategies across the content areas of reading, writing, and mathematics. (CR)