Oral language and early literacy skills are theorized to provide the foundation for reading acquisition. To understand these relations, methods are needed that depict dynamic skill development in the context of reading acquisition. We modeled contributions of school-entry skills and early skill trajectories to later reading with 105 5-year-old…

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…

Due to barriers to kindergarten readiness, many kindergarten students do not enter kindergarten with the prerequisite skills needed for reading. A number of students do not leave kindergarten with adequate reading skills needed for future success. As a result, students are ill-prepared for first grade and are at risk for future reading failure.…

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,…

Research has shown that: (1) Curriculum-based monitoring (CBM) can be easily implemented and interpreted by teachers (e.g., Fuchs, Deno, & Mirkin, 1984); (2) student outcomes have improved when teachers use CBM to inform instructional decision making (e.g., Fuchs, Fuchs, Hamlett, & Stecker, 1991); (3) reliable and valid measures have been…

Background/Context: Reading achievement declined drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic (Bailey et al., 2021). One report suggests more than one-third of fourth-grade students cannot read at a basic level and access to effective literacy instruction is particularly limited for minority students and students with learning disabilities (Ellis et…

This study describes trajectories of early literacy skill development of 99 children (n = 55 boys) in their first year of primary school in New Zealand (NZ). Children were assessed twice weekly for 8 weeks on Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 2011) First Sound Fluency (FSF) and AIMSweb Letter Sound…

Although several measures are available for monitoring kindergarten reading progress, little research has directly compared them to determine which are superior in predicting year-end reading skills relative to other measures, and how validity may change across the school year as reading skills develop. A sample of 426 kindergarten students who…

This paper describes the origins of the widely used curriculum-based measure of oral reading fluency (ORF) and how the creation and use of ORF norms has evolved over time. Norms for ORF can be used to help educators make decisions about which students might need intervention in reading and to help monitor students' progress once instruction has…

Previous research on curriculum-based measurement of oral reading fluency (CBM ORF) found high levels of variability around the estimates of students' fluency; however, little research has studied the issue of variability specifically with well-designed passage sets and a sample of students who scored below benchmark for the purpose of progress…

Oregon's Effective Behavioral and Instructional Support Systems (EBISS) initiative was implemented in 25 school districts. The initiative trained and coached district leaders and teachers in the use of the EBISS model through the lens of implementation science. The EBISS model integrates school-wide positive behavior intervention and supports…

Language in the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) allows the use of response-to-intervention (RTI) methodology in the identification of specific learning disabilities. However, there is no consensus on decision rules using curriculum-based measurement of oral reading fluency (CBM-R) for defining responsiveness. The…

In this technical report, we present the results of a study to gather criterion-related evidence for Grade K-1 easyCBM® reading measures. We used correlations to examine the relation between the easyCBM® measures and other published measures with known reliability and validity evidence, including the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy…

This study examined the utility of curriculum-based measures of oral reading fluency (ORF) to distinguish between gifted and general education students. Differences in reading proficiency and growth rate were assessed using cross-sectional data from more than 900 students in second through fifth grade who regularly participated in their district's…

A fairly recent definition of reading disability (RD) is that in the form of a hybrid model. The model views RD as a latent construct that is manifested through various observable unexpected impairments in reading-related skills and through inadequate response to intervention. The current report evaluated this new conceptualization of RD from an…