The purpose of this study was to examine the amount of attention devoted to data-based decision-making in Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) professional development materials. Sixty-nine CBM instructional sources were reviewed, including 45 presentations, 22 manuals, and two books. The content of the presentations and manuals/books was coded into…

Teachers have difficulty using data from Curriculum-based Measurement (CBM) progress graphs of students with learning difficulties for instructional decision-making. As a first step in unraveling those difficulties, we studied teachers' comprehension of CBM graphs. Using think-aloud methodology, we examined 23 teachers' ability to…

In this special issue, we explore the decision-making aspect of "data-based decision-making". The articles in the issue address a wide range of research questions, designs, methods, and analyses, but all focus on data-based decision-making for students with learning difficulties. In this first article, we introduce the topic of…

The technical adequacy of CBM maze-scores as indicators of reading level and growth for seventh-grade secondary-school students was examined. Participants were 452 Dutch students who completed weekly maze measures over a period of 23 weeks. Criterion measures were school level, dyslexia status, scores and growth on a standardized reading test.…

The authors examined three instructional approaches for improving teachers' curriculum-based measurement (CBM) graph comprehension, each differing in the extent to which reading the data, interpreting the data, and linking the data to instruction were emphasized. Participants were 164 elementary school teachers who were randomly assigned to one of…

Teachers must be proficient at using data to evaluate the effects of instructional strategies and interventions, and must be able to make, describe, justify, and validate their data-based instructional decisions to parents, students, and educational colleagues. An important related skill is the ability to accurately read and interpret…

Students with and without learning disabilities often struggle to learn a foreign language (FL). Teachers could benefit from a measure designed to screen and identify students at risk for FL learning difficulties. In this study, we examined the reliability and validity of scores from four curriculum-based measures (CBM) as potential indicators of…

The purpose of this study was to examine slopes from curriculum-based measures of writing (CBM-W) as indicators of growth in writing. Responses to story prompts administered for 5 min to 89 students in Grades 2-5 were collected across 12 weeks and scored for correct word sequences (CWS) and correct minus incorrect sequences (CIWS). Linear mixed…

The present study examined the technical adequacy of maze-selection tasks constructed in 2 different ways: typical versus novel. We selected distractors for each measure systematically based on rules related to the content of the passage and the part of speech of the correct choice. Participants included 262 middle school students who were…

The purpose of this study was to examine the validity and reliability of Curriculum-Based Measures in writing for English learners. Participants were 36 high school English learners with moderate to high levels of English language proficiency. Predictor variables were type of writing prompt (picture, narrative, and expository), time (3, 5, and 7…

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the use of Latent Growth Modeling (LGM) as a method for estimating reliability of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) progress-monitoring data. The LGM approach permits the error associated with each measure to differ at each time point, thus providing an alternative method for examining of the…

The technical adequacy of curriculum-based measures in the form of short and simple vocabulary-matching probes to predict students' performance and progress in science at the secondary level was investigated. Participants were 198 seventh-grade students from 10 science classrooms. Curriculum-based measurements (CBM) were 5-min vocabulary-matching…

The reliability and validity of three curriculum-based measures as indicators of learning English as a foreign language were examined. Participants were 260 Dutch students in Grades 8 and 9 who were receiving English-language instruction. Predictor measures were maze-selection, Dutch-to-English word translation, and English-to-Dutch word…

The validity and reliability of curriculum-based measures in reading as indicators of performance and progress for secondary-school students were examined. Thirty-five grade 8 students completed reading aloud and maze-selection measures weekly for 10 weeks. Criterion measures were the state standards test in reading and the Woodcock-Johnson III…

In this article, the authors review the research on curriculum-based measurement (CBM) in reading published since the time of Marston's 1989 review. They focus on the technical adequacy of CBM related to measures, materials, and representation of growth. The authors conclude by discussing issues to be addressed in future research, and they raise…