Although several measures are available for monitoring kindergarten reading progress, little research has directly compared them to determine which are superior in predicting year-end reading skills relative to other measures, and how validity may change across the school year as reading skills develop. A sample of 426 kindergarten students who…

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to overwhelm the functioning and outcomes of educational systems throughout the nation. The public education system is under particular scrutiny given that students, families, and educators are under considerable stress to maintain academic progress. Since the beginning of the crisis, school-systems…

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.…

Development of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and the creation of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), changes the pattern of accountability testing. These changes raise the question: "How should NAEP's validity and utility be…

In this technical report, we provide the results of a series of studies on the technical adequacy of the early reading measures available on the easyCBM[R] assessment system. The results from the two-level hierarchical linear growth model analyses suggest that the reliability of the slope estimates for the easyCBM[R] reading measures are strong,…

This study investigated the equivalence of scores from computerized and paper-and-pencil formats of a series of K-3 reading screening tests. Concerns about score equivalence on the computerized formats were warranted because of the use of reading passages, computer unfamiliarity of primary school students, and teacher versus computer…