Reviewing the literature is an important part of academic work, as it helps readers see what has come before, what has and has not worked, and situates the author's place in the ongoing discussion. Accepting this view, extensive reading literature often points to Day and Bamford (1988) as identifying Kelly (1969) as crediting Palmer (1921) as the…

Historically, there has been concern about students losing reading ability over extended breaks from school, commonly in the summer, but studies of this phenomenon have produced inconsistent results. We applied exploratory visual analysis of multiple datasets to examine whether students in Grades K-5 appear to lose or improve in various reading…

Kindergarten reading screening measures typically identify many students as at risk who later meet criteria on important outcome measures (i.e., false positives). To address this issue, we evaluated a gated screening process that included accelerated progress monitoring, followed by a simple goal/reward procedure (skill vs. performance assessment,…

The purpose of this article was to offer guidance to educators in evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and most effective uses of commercial reading assessment suites. We provide three resources to help educators who are responsible for making instructional decisions in reading using formal screening, benchmark, interim, and progress-monitoring…

This article argues that reading levels, a seemingly neutral aspect of literacy instruction of neoliberal schooling, initiate students into the symbolic templates of capitalism. I explore young children's effects, relations, and interpretation of the field of meanings surrounding reading levels and grades in a kindergarten classroom in the U.S. I…

A fundamental assumption of multi-tiered systems of support is the bidirectional movement of students between tiers. In comparison to research on when to intensify instruction, less attention has been paid to the validity of decisions to exit students from supplemental supports. We used data from 554 third-grade students who met the criteria to be…

This study identifies students' academic trajectories in the middle grades relative to a set of college readiness benchmarks. We apply math and reading college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students across the nation. Student-level and school-level demographic characteristics significantly predict academic…

Recent simulations suggest that trend line decision rules applied to curriculum-based measurement of reading progress monitoring data may lead to inaccurate interpretations unless data are collected for upward of 3 months. The authors of those studies did not manipulate goal line slope or account for a student's level of initial performance when…

This paper explores an inhuman reading of 'hands' with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad's agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already…

School psychologists regularly use decision rules to interpret student response to intervention in reading. Recent research suggests that the accuracy of those decision rules depends on the duration of progress monitoring, the number of observations available, and the amount of measurement error present. In this study, we extended existing…

This study examined the relationship between two reading curriculum based measures (oral reading fluency and MAZE) and the reading and mathematics subsections of a high stakes test administered at the 5th and 6th grades. Bivariate correlations were conducted between each curriculum based measure and each subsection of the test. Results indicated…

We used existing reading (n = 1,498) and math (n = 2,260) data to evaluate state test scores for screening middle school students. In Phase 1, state test data were used to create a research-derived cut score that was optimal for predicting state test performance the following year. In Phase 2, those cut scores were applied with future cohorts.…

The PM Benchmark Reading Assessment Resource (PM Benchmarks) provides information about primary students' level of achievement in reading accurately, fluently, and in understanding unseen texts. As part of the assessment, students have to orally retell what they have read and orally answer comprehension questions. This oral use of language…

The purpose of this single-subject longitudinal study was to examine the Spanish and English biliterate development of U.S. Latino Spanish/English speaking students, who we call emerging bilingual students, as they participated in an innovative biliteracy instructional program titled Literacy Squared®. Findings indicate that across the three years…

Data from a large suburban school district in Tennessee (N = 910) were used to examine the effects of the Kindergarten Readiness program as measured by third grade End of Year (EOY) benchmark performance assessments in reading and math. The groups of students studied included kindergarteners with summer birthdays ("SK"), kindergarteners…