Purpose: Children from low--socioeconomic status families often perform poorly on standardized vocabulary assessments. The primary purpose of the study was to determine whether lexical diversity as measured by "D" (Malvern, Richards, Chipere, & Durán, 2004) serves as a valid measure of vocabulary in at-risk, low-income, predominantly…

Background/Context: As increasing attention is paid to preparing students to succeed in school, the development and adoption of research-based curricula have become progressively more important. However, many curricular designs lack a basis in scientific evidence; research and curricular design are frequently treated as two separate enterprises.…

We report findings of a validation study comparing two screening tools: the Student Risk Screening Scale-Internalizing and Externalizing (SRSS-IE, an adapted version of the Student Risk Screening Scale) and the Social Skills Improvement System-Performance Screening Guide (SSiS-PSG). Participants included 458 kindergarten through fifth-grade…

This paper summarizes an action research project to develop a math screening instrument that would be effective (valid and reliable) and efficient (time for administration). An instrument was developed after review of the mathematics assessment and mathematics disabilities literature. The instrument was administered to kindergarten, first, and…

Research Findings: This study examined the validity and reliability of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; R. C. Pianta, K. M. La Paro, & B. K. Hamre, 2008) in Finnish kindergartens. A pair of trained observers used the CLASS to observe 49 kindergarten teachers (47 female, 2 male) on two different days. Questionnaires measuring…

In this study, predictive classification accuracy was used to select those tasks from a kindergarten screening battery that best identified children who, three years later, were classified as educable mentally handicapped or as having a specific learning disability. A subset of measures enabled correct classification of 91% of the children in…