Drawing on cognitive theory in reading comprehension, Sentence Order Fluency (SOF) is proposed as a method for monitoring progress in reading comprehension. In this article, we present results of a pilot study on SOF conducted between April and June 2023, with a group of 119 students in Grades 4, 5, and 6 in a charter school in the mid-Atlantic…

Curriculum-based measurement of reading (CBM-R) is a common assessment educators use to monitor student growth in broad reading skills and evaluate the effectiveness of instructional programs. Computer-adaptive tests (CATs), such as Star Reading, have been cited as a viable option to formatively assess reading growth. We used Bayesian…

This qualitative study surfaced beliefs around reading instruction and reading development at the onset of an elementary literacy methods course. Prior understandings and knowledge around reading instruction and reading acquisition emerge through various experiences and have the potential to contradict notions presented by teacher educators. This…

Monitoring the progress of student learning is an important part of teachers' data-based decision making. One such tool that can equip teachers with information about students' learning progress throughout the school year and thus facilitate monitoring and instructional decision making is learning progress assessments. In practical contexts and…

The use of online literacy applications is proliferating in elementary classrooms. Using data generated by these applications is assumed to be helpful for teachers to identify struggling readers. Unfortunately, many teachers are unsure how to use and interpret the plethora of data from these apps. In this longitudinal study, we followed a cohort…

The current study evaluated whether goal-setting practices that account for seasonal developmental patterns of reading growth decreased the number of weeks data needed to be collected in order to yield accurate response to intervention decisions for a sample of 224 third-grade students. The extent to which more complex decision-making practices…

Despite repeated findings that within-year growth in oral reading rate is nonlinear for many students, existing decision-making frameworks to evaluate response to intervention assume that growth is linear across an entire school year. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the consequences of failing to account for nonlinear growth among…

The overall aim of the current investigation was to develop and validate the initial version of the Minnesota Inference Assessment (MIA). MIA is a web-based measure of inference processes in Grades K-2. MIA leverages the affordances of different media to evaluate inference processes in a nonreading context, using age-appropriate fiction and…

The overall aim of the current investigation was to develop and validate the initial version of the Minnesota Inference Assessment (MIA). MIA is a web-based measure of inference processes in K-2. MIA leverages the affordances of different media to evaluate inference processes in a nonreading context, using age-appropriate fiction and nonfiction…

Educators and researchers measure student improvement in words read correct per minute (WRCM) to evaluate student response to reading interventions. The utility of evaluating improvement in WRCM via curriculum-based measures to make instructional decisions is based upon the assumption that growth in WRCM is predictive of performance on meaningful…

To preliminarily validate the Monitoring Instructional Responsiveness-Reading (MIR-R) for use in low-income settings, data were collected from 147 students from first through fifth grades who were primarily from low-income families. Data from three MIR-R components (Total Words Read, Ideas Attempted, Ideas Correct) and three related dependent…

Progress monitoring has been adopted as an integral part of multi-tiered support systems. Oral reading fluency (ORF) is the most established assessment for progress-monitoring purposes. To generate valid trend lines or slopes, ORF passages must be of equivalent difficulty. Recently, however, evidence indicates that ORF passages are not equivalent,…

Curriculum-Based Measurement of Reading (CBM-R) is frequently used to monitor instructional effects and evaluate response to instruction. Educators often view the data graphically on a time-series graph that might include a variety of statistical and visual aids, which are intended to facilitate the interpretation. This study evaluated the effects…

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…

Within multitiered instructional delivery models, progress monitoring is a key mechanism for determining whether a child demonstrates an adequate response to instruction. One measure commonly used to monitor the reading progress of students is oral reading fluency (ORF). This study examined the extent to which ORF slope predicts reading…