Ways that reading evaluation programs can bring reading success to individual students are presented. Each chapter is written by an authority on one of the following topics: what evaluation is, who does it, and when it should be done; reading program goals as the basis for evaluation; informal techniques for assessing prereading behavior; use of…

The Pre-Reading Skills Battery is a group-administered diagnostic battery measuring skills considered to be prerequisite to beginning reading instruction. Three major areas of skills are included: language, visual perception, and auditory perception. Within each of these three areas several skills are tested through two or three sub-tests. In some…

General considerations involving the use of reading tests, the selection of reading tests, and the construction of informal reading inventories are presented in the first section of this monograph. The second section is devoted to test information and is divided into the following four parts: some screening and diagnostic tests of physical aspects…

The study examines the impact of topic familiarity and passage sight vocabulary on lexical inferencing and retention. Independent variables include (a) a topic familiarity questionnaire, and (b) a passage sight vocabulary test. A repeated-measures design was used with a cross-sectional sample of 35 adult L2 learners of Spanish. Ss read narratives…

This study illustrates the regularity with which the children of mostly Mexican immigrants in Chicago interpret languages and cultural practices for their families. It also tests the hypothesis, generated from qualitative research, that such "language brokering" is related to academic outcomes. Using data collected from a subset of…

This article explores definitions of reading comprehension, research on how reading comprehension is assessed, and issues in assessing the reading comprehension of English language learners (ELLs). By way of illustration, I present aspects of the literacy practices of an intermediate-grade ELL in a suburban school of the Lower Mainland of British…

Many of the states that claim to have large shares of their students reaching proficiency in reading and mathematics under the No Child Left Behind Act have set less stringent standards for meeting that threshold than lower-performing states, a new federal study finds. The study, "Mapping 2005 State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP…

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric ("Some surgeons are butchers"), literal ("Some surgeons are fathers"), or non-meaningful sentences…

Randomly equivalent forms (REF) of tests in listening and reading for nonnative speakers of English were created by stratified random assignment of items to forms, stratifying on item content and predicted difficulty. The study included 50 replications of the procedure for each test. Each replication generated 2 REFs. The equivalence of those 2…

This report examines the relationship between various characteristics of students with disabilities and the probability that they would participate in the NAEP assessments, given the current methods of accommodation adopted by their state. The report describes the methodological approach which calculates for each state an expected inclusion rate…

This study aimed at investigating the effect of multiple intelligences strategies comprising logical-mathematical intelligence, verbal-linguistic intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence and interpersonal intelligence on ninth grade students' reading comprehension achievement in an EFL setting. The population of the study consisted of all ninth…

According to the 2004 National Assessment of Educational Progress, males who have made it through 12 years of school have significantly poorer reading skills than their female peers. In every age group, boys have been scoring lower than girls annually for more than three decades on U.S. Department of Education reading tests. The longer boys are in…

Background: Research has shown that early identification of children with language issues is critical for effective intervention, and yet many children are not identified until school age. The use of parent-completed rating scales, especially in urban, minority populations, might improve early identification if parent ratings are found to be…

This study is part of a 5-year professional development intervention aimed at improving science and literacy achievement of English language learners (or ELL students) in urban elementary schools within an environment increasingly driven by high-stakes testing and accountability. Specifically, the study examined science achievement at the end of…

English language learners (ELLs) constitute one of the fastest growing subpopulations of students in the United States. It is important to determine whether the assessments used by states in determining students' proficiencies are valid and fair for ELLs. This study focused on several standards-based assessments in mathematics and science…