Although research provides ample evidence of teaching methods that facilitate students' learning of specific word meanings, the potential of instruction to impact students' general vocabulary knowledge has remained an unanswered question. This article reports on a three-year formative experiment that developed, implemented, and tested a long-term,…

This article reports on a 3-year formative experiment involving the implementation and testing of a long-term, multifaceted vocabulary instruction program in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms in three demographically distinct schools. The quantitative findings indicate that the students, across the 3 years of the project, showed accelerated…

In this study, we identified the code-related (decoding, fluency) and language comprehension (vocabulary, listening comprehension) demands of the CBM-Maze test, a formative assessment, and compared them to those of the Gates-MacGinitie test, a standardized summative assessment. The demands of these reading comprehension tests and their…

"No Child Left Behind" has highlighted the need for new types of assessments that not only provide high-quality evidence about what students know and can do, but also help to move learning forward. This paper describes a linked set of formative and summative reading assessments designed to address the tradeoffs inherent in these two…

Teachers at Woodlawn Middle School in Long Grove, Illinois are no different than most. They were discouraged by the amount of testing taking place in their classrooms, frustrated with not having the kind of data they needed, and feeling overwhelmed by the data they did have. The teachers wanted to make better schoolwide instructional decisions,…