Studied the factorial invariance of scores from male and female students when reading comprehension was assessed with narrative and expository passages related to war and military content. Narrative and expository item factor loadings and intercepts were invariant for both genders, a finding that supports the use of passages about war for reading…

In state legislatures and school boards around the country, the approach and the quality of reading instruction are under attack because of a decline in reading scores. The best reading instruction draws on the strengths of different philosophies. School boards should encourage schools to teach both phonics and the whole-language approach. (MLF)

All students must read well enough to be able to understand content that is necessary in the workplace. Technical education teachers must ascertain where each student is achieving in reading and provide sequential experiences in reading technical materials. (JOW)

The Reading Levels of a population of 93 Spanish deaf students were examined. All study participants had prelingual profound hearing loss; their ages ranged from 9 to 20 years. All were enrolled in compulsory education during 2002-2003 in the Canary Islands (Spain). They were evaluated with sentence and text comprehension subtests from the…

Four experiments examined the nature of forgetting and the processing--storage relationship during performance on a prevalent working memory task, the reading span test. Using two different presentation paradigms, Experiments 1 and 2 replicated Towse, Hitch, and Hutton's (1998, 2000) finding that the Short-Final lists, which presented a long…

This article reviews the Early Reading Diagnostic Assessment second edition (ERDA-2). The Early Reading Diagnostic Assessment, second edition (ERDA-2; The Psychological Corporation, 2003) assesses the acquisition of reading skills in children from kindergarten to Grade 3. The ERDA-2 is a collection of subtests adapted primarily from the Wechsler…

Test method facet has been considered as an important factor affecting the testee's performance on a test. That is, a test used to assess a particular ability would yield different results when different test methods are used to gauge the same trait. The language of presentation is an aspect of test method conceived of as affecting the performance…

Large scale testing in English affects second-language students not only greatly but also differently than first-language learners. The research literature reports that confounding factors in such large-scale testing such as varying test formats may differentially affect the performance of students from diverse backgrounds. An investigation of…

In this article, I describe a practical application of the Roussos and Stout (1996) multidimensional analysis framework for interpreting group performance differences on an ESL reading proficiency test. Although a variety of statistical methods have been developed for flagging test items that function differentially for equal ability examinees…

This report reviews and evaluates the tradition of assessing early literacy with formal tests. It begins with a historical account of the readiness movement, focusing on the development of formal measures of early literacy and tracing the development of the movement into the 1980s. Next, the paper analyzes in depth tests that are currently…

Ways that reading evaluation programs can bring reading success to individual students are presented. Each chapter is written by an authority on one of the following topics: what evaluation is, who does it, and when it should be done; reading program goals as the basis for evaluation; informal techniques for assessing prereading behavior; use of…

Ways that reading evaluation programs can bring reading success to individual students are presented. Each chapter is written by an authority on one of the following topics: what evaluation is, who does it, and when it should be done; reading program goals as the basis for evaluation; informal techniques for assessing prereading behavior; use of…

The Pre-Reading Skills Battery is a group-administered diagnostic battery measuring skills considered to be prerequisite to beginning reading instruction. Three major areas of skills are included: language, visual perception, and auditory perception. Within each of these three areas several skills are tested through two or three sub-tests. In some…

General considerations involving the use of reading tests, the selection of reading tests, and the construction of informal reading inventories are presented in the first section of this monograph. The second section is devoted to test information and is divided into the following four parts: some screening and diagnostic tests of physical aspects…

The achievement gap between African American students and their Caucasian peers has been of concern for quite some time in the field of education (Orfield, Losen, Wald, & Swanson, 2004). As a result, this article examined high stakes reading test scores for 4,135 African American students in grades 3 through 10 in a Midwestern school district.…