In the United States, educational thought leaders have called for higher expectations (Gordon Commission, 2010), more rigorous college and career readiness standards for K-12 education (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), and new constructs such as 21st century skills…

This article reports on the development of an online dynamic approach for assessing and improving students' reading comprehension of science texts--the dynamic assessment for reading comprehension of science text (DARCST). The DARCST blended assessment and response-specific instruction into a holistic learning task for grades 5 and 6 students. The…

For decades, standardized reading comprehension tests have consisted of a series of passages and associated multiple-choice questions. Although widely used in and out of the classroom, there continues to be considerable disagreement regarding how or whether such tests have net value in the service of advancing educational progress in reading. This…

This narrative synthesis reviews the psychometric properties of commercially and publicly available retell instruments used to assess the reading comprehension of students in grades K-12. Eleven instruments met selection criteria and were systematically coded for data related to the administration procedures, scoring procedures, and technical…

Despite the importance of writing analytically in response to texts, there are few assessments measuring students' mastery of this skill. This manuscript describes the development of a response-to-text assessment (RTA) intended for use in research. In a subsequent validity investigation we examined whether the RTA distinguished among classrooms in…

Assessment of lexical/semantic knowledge is performed with a variety of tests varying in response requirements. The present study exemplifies the application of modern statistical approaches in the adaptation and assessment of the psychometric properties of the "Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Revised" (PPVT-R) Greek. Confirmatory…

In practice, vertical scales have been continually used to measure students' achievement progress across several grade levels and have been considered very challenging psychometric procedures. Recently, such practices have been drawing many criticisms. The major criticisms focus on dimensionality and construct equivalence of the latent trait or…

This article discusses methods for evaluating students' content-area literacy skills. Four specific factors that affect content-area literacy are described: vocabulary knowledge, topic knowledge, text structure knowledge, and textbook readability, along with methods of evaluating each of the factors. Most of these methods have not yet been…

METHODS OF TESTING, EVALUATING, AND TEACHING READING IN THE FOURTH, FIFTH AND SIXTH GRADES ARE DESCRIBED. CONSTRUCTION AND DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTAL TESTS OF VARIABILITY IN READING SPEED ARE DISCUSSED. DESIGN WAS BASED ON THE RATIONALE THAT A MEANINGFUL READING-TIME SCORE DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE SUBJECT'S PURPOSE FOR READING. WHILE READING SPEED MAY…

These proceedings contain the papers of the IADIS International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2013), October 22-24, 2013, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by The University of North Texas (UNT), sponsored by the…