Despite prevalent use and practical application, the current and standard assessment of oral reading fluency (ORF) presents considerable limitations which reduces its validity in estimating growth and monitoring student progress, including: (a) high cost of implementation; (b) tenuous passage equivalence; and (c) bias, large standard error, and…

Lack of reading fluency is a significant obstacle to children's ability to learn from text. In this study, we explored the effects of two practices used to scaffold fluency -- repeated reading of a passage and listening to a passage before reading it. Since the differences between these practices may be subtle, we employed eye tracking to measure…

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,…

Text complexity in elementary classrooms is typically measured by traditional readability tools, which rely on surface-level measures of word and sentence complexity. Theoretical and empirical work on text complexity, however, indicates that additional measures of semantics, syntax, and discourse structure may be equally important for…

This study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1-6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade…

Given the deficiencies of readability formulae as reliable tools for measuring text readability in educational settings, this study aims to offer a new measure to improve the current methods of testing the readability levels of texts through the incorporation of the newly-developed concept of emotioncy. To this end, a group of 221 students were…

Standard 10 of the Common Core State Standards attends to students' capacity with complex text. This standard distinguishes the Common Core State Standards from previous standards documents. This article describes a process--the Text Complexity Multi-Index (TCMI)--that supports teachers in studying texts to support their students in…

The "Common Core State Standards/English Language Arts" include the ability to become increasingly more capable with complex text over the school career, redirecting attention to the measurement of text complexity. While suggesting multiple criteria, the Standards offer a single measure of text complexity--Lexiles. Additional…

Recent research has demonstrated that slight increases of inter-letter spacing have a positive impact on skilled readers' recognition of visually presented words. In the present study, we examined whether this effect generalises to young normal readers and readers with developmental dyslexia, and whether increased inter-letter spacing affects the…

Curriculum-based measurement of reading (CBM-R) is used to estimate oral reading fluency. Unlike many traditional published tests, CBM-R materials are often comprised of 20 to 30 alternate forms/passages. Historically, CBM-R assessment materials were sampled from curricular materials. Recent research has documented the potentially deleterious…

Beyond reliability and validity, measures used to model student growth must consist of multiple probes that are equivalent in level of difficulty to establish consistent measurement conditions across time. Although existing evidence supports the reliability of curriculum-based measurement in reading (CBMR), few studies have empirically evaluated…

An annotated list of children's books published within the last 15 years and related to Louisiana culture, environment, and economics are linked to the Louisiana Content Standards. Readability levels of selected books are included, providing guidance as to whether a book is appropriate for independent student use. The thirty-three books listed are…

A series of magnet trade books were analyzed against a validated list of magnet concepts (Barrow, 1990a) and their Flesch (1974) Readability was determined. These trade books were used to supplement a second grade unit on magnetism locally constructed from AIM's "Mostly Magnets" (1991). All trade books accurately described how like and unlike…

This paper describes a study designed to find out whether children's reading would be affected by line spacing that is wider or narrower than the commonly used default values. The realistic, high quality test material was set using a range of four different line spacing values, and twenty-four children in Years 1 and 2 (between five and seven…

A case study of a child who was a part of a larger reading-practice research study is presented. Data analysis from the larger study yielded a strong effect size for children in the experimental group who used decodable text for reading practice. The pre- and posttest scores of one child included in the treatment were not used in the statistical…