Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and preintervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…

Unidimensionality is an important assumption of measurement but it is violated very often. Most of the time, tests are deliberately constructed to be multidimensional to cover all aspects of the intended construct. In such situations, the application of unidimensional item response theory (IRT) models is not justifieddue to poor model fit and…

A teacher's ability to read effectively is critical to that individual's ability to teach reading skills. Correspondingly, most state departments of education require that prospective teachers earn a passing score on a standardized reading comprehension test before they can enter university-based teacher education programs or otherwise get a…

The objectives of this study are to see if Reciprocal Teaching (RT) is more a effective Language Learning Strategy (LLS) to teach reading comprehension, and to see if students of high reading comprehension achievement have better reading comprehension than those of moderate and low reading comprehension achievement. The 3 x 2 factorial design is…

This study investigated the effect of cloze item practice on reading comprehension, where cloze items were either created by humans, by machine using natural language processing techniques, or randomly. Participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 302) took a pre-test, read a text, and took part in one of five conditions, Do-Nothing, Re-Read,…

This study presents empirical evidence for the hypothesis that reading purpose may impact upon the cognitive processes that L2 readers use in comprehending a text. 25 advanced learners of English were put into two purpose groups--testing condition (TC) and learning condition (LC). The participants in the TC read two expository passages and…

This demonstration introduces and presents an innovative online cognitive diagnostic assessment, developed to identify the types of cognitive processes that readers use during comprehension; specifically, processes that distinguish between subtypes of struggling comprehenders. Cognitive diagnostic assessments are designed to provide valuable…

Although the recent identification of the five critical components of early literacy has been a catalyst for modifications to the content of materials used to provide reading instruction and the tools used to examine student's acquisition of early literacy skills, these skills have not received equal attention from test developers and publishers.…

This dissertation is developed around two studies created with the goal of describing and quantifying current educators' knowledge and perceptions of reading assessment and subsequent data-based instructional decision making. Unique to the field, a critical component of this study is an emphasis on educators' development of "data…

The FAIR-FS consists of computer-adaptive reading comprehension and oral language screening tasks that provide measures to track growth over time, as well as a Probability of Literacy Success (PLS) linked to grade-level performance (i.e., the 40th percentile) on the reading comprehension subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-10) in the…

This instructional support guide describes the national-level research that forms the foundation of the Idaho Reading Initiative. It includes information about the items chosen for the Idaho Reading Indicator, as well as practical suggestions to help bring best practices to the classroom. The following sections are included in the guide: (1)…

Finds some evidence that out-of-level tests are more suitable and reliable for poor readers than are on-level tests. (FL)

Evidence exists that reading achievement can be measured simply and validly by having students read aloud for one minute from vocabulary lists drawn from their basal reading series. Direct and frequent measurement of student performance using this procedure provides a means for continuously evaluating a student's instructional program. The present…

Between April 1985 and January 1988, the Educational Testing Service evaluated Al Manaahil (The Sources), a television series in reading for Arab children. The series, produced and broadcast in Jordan, contained 65 half-hour shows in Modern Standard Arabic for children in grades 1 through 4. More than 5,000 children in Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia…

The Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) was developed by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), in response to Texas House Bill 72 (1984), which mandated a new basic skills assessment program for mathematics, reading, and writing at grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. This is one in a series of Instructional Strategies Guides designed to…