Curriculum Associates' "i-Ready® Personalized Instruction" ("i-Ready") is a supplemental, online personalized instruction program available for mathematics and reading. Prior research has indicated "i-Ready" has a positive impact on student achievement for students overall (e.g., Swain, Randel, & Norman Dvorak,…

This simulation study examines the measurement precision, item exposure rates, and the depth of the MAP® Growth™ item pools under various grade-level restrictions. Unlike most summative assessments, MAP Growth allows examinees to see items from any grade level, regardless of the examinee's actual grade level. It does not limit the test to items…

The goal of this study was to investigate the nature of online comprehension monitoring, its predictors, and its relation to reading comprehension. Questions were concerned with (a) beginning readers' sensitivity to inconsistencies, (b) predictors of online comprehension monitoring, and (c) the relation of online comprehension monitoring to…

Assessing students' emerging literacy skills is crucial for identifying areas where a child may be falling behind and can lead directly to an increased chance of reading success. The Waterford Assessment of Core Skills (WACS), a computerized adaptive test of early literacy for students in prekindergarten through 2nd grade, addresses this need.…

The goal of this study was to investigate the nature of online comprehension monitoring, its predictors, and its relation to reading comprehension. Questions were concerned with (a) beginning readers' sensitivity to inconsistencies, (b) predictors of online comprehension monitoring, and (c) the relation of online comprehension monitoring to…

Despite prevalent use and practical application, the current and standard assessment of oral reading fluency (ORF) presents considerable limitations which reduces its validity in estimating growth and monitoring student progress, including: (a) high cost of implementation; (b) tenuous passage equivalence; and (c) bias, large standard error, and…

There is strong theoretical support for oral reading fluency (ORF) as an essential building block of reading proficiency. The current and standard ORF assessment procedure requires that students read aloud a grade-level passage (˜ 250 words) in a one-to-one administration, with the number of words read correctly in 60 seconds constituting their…

This guide was created as a resource to help families better understand "Measures of Academic Progress"® (MAP®), and their child's results. The guide provides answers to a variety of questions such as: "What is MAP?"; "What does MAP measure?"; "How do schools and teachers use MAP scores?"; "Can MAP tell…

Recent legislation such as No Child Left Behind and the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA) increasingly pressure teachers and schools to be accountable for instructional time in the form of improved test scores. As a result, students are given an increasing variety of assessments in a given school year in an attempt to measure academic…

This paper investigates the power of the computer guided clinical interview (CI) and new curriculum based measurement (CBM) measures to identify and help children at risk of low mathematics achievement. We use data from large numbers of children in Kindergarten through Grade 3 to investigate the construct validity of CBM risk categories. The basic…

Design research studies provide significant opportunities to study new innovations and approaches and how they affect the forms of learning in complex classroom ecologies. This paper reports on a two-week long design research study with twelve 2nd through 4th graders using curricular materials and a tablet-based diagnostic assessment system, both…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a universal social skills program, the Social Skills Improvement System Classwide Intervention Program (SSIS-CIP; Elliott & Gresham, 2007), for students in first grade. Classrooms from 6 elementary schools were randomly assigned to treatment or business-as-usual control conditions.…

The present study investigates the effects of syllable awareness on the word-reading process of students reading in a highly transparent orthography (Turkish). The participants were 90 second graders belonging to one of two distinct levels of syllable-awareness skills (50 with poor syllable-awareness skills and 40 with proficient…

The principle of "inversion," that a + b - b "must" equal a, is a fundamental property of arithmetic, but many children fail to apply it in symbolic contexts through 10 years of age. We explore three hypotheses relating to the use of inversion that stem from a model proposed by Siegler and Araya (2005). Hypothesis 1 is that…

This article presents results from two studies that included ethnically and socioeconomically diverse samples totaling 4,462 children in kindergarten through third grade. Each study examined the psychometric properties of a web-based, self-administered battery of assessments of social-emotional comprehension called "SELweb." Assessment…