Two studies explored the technical adequacy of various measures of advanced phonics skills. In Study 1, the advanced phonics measures consisted of pseudowords, real words, or a combination of both. Participants included 39 students in the third grade. Test-retest correlations for all measures were above 0.8 and interrater reliability was high.…

The present study investigated the effects of reading strategies based on collaborative learning approach on students' reading comprehension and reading strategy use. The quasi-experimental research study was performed with two groups of students. While the control group was taught in the traditional way, the experimental group received reading…

Much hope is placed on education systems to reduce socio-economic learning gaps. However, in South Africa, uneven functioning of the school system widens learning gaps. This paper analyses education performance using ANA data. Weak calibration and inter-temporal or inter-grade comparability of ANA test scores limit their usefulness for measuring…

Scores on national and international tests for students in the United States indicated that students are not performing proficiently in reading. Furthermore, students are not able to comprehend complex reading tasks, which resulted in an adolescent literacy crisis (NGA & CCSO, 2010). In this collective case study, I explored ways four fifth…

The Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) carries out large-scale cross-national research studies in member countries in the Southern and Eastern Africa region. It aims to assess the conditions of schooling and performance levels of learners and teachers in the areas of literacy and numeracy. SACMEQ has…

In 2012, the Ministry of Education, Afghanistan, engaged the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) as a partner to support the development of a national learning assessment program in Afghanistan. To achieve this goal, the Learning Assessment unit of the Ministry of Education and ACER have collaborated to design and implement the…

The study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the HELPS-SG curriculum and a small group repeated reading (RR) intervention on oral reading fluency and comprehension. The participants of this study were 42 second-grade ELL's who attended an elementary school in the southwestern United States. The participants were either a…

Education researchers and literacy specialists have responded to declining reading scores among high school students by calling on teachers across subject areas to teach "disciplinary literacy," which introduces students to the ways discipline-specific knowledge is produced and communicated and teaches students to apply different reading…

The article addresses some problems and options in setting standards on language tests and examinations. More specifically, it reports on a set of three workshops conducted in the European context where standard setting in language education typically concerns linking tests and examinations to the Council of Europe's "Common European…

This article describes the actions taken by the members of the school leadership team at McWhirter Elementary Professional Development Laboratory School in Webster, Texas, when the results of the state reading assessment in spring 2010, had taken a sudden and dramatic drop from the previous year. The team designed an action research study to…

On the basis of a validation study of a new test for assessing low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension skills--the SALT-reading--we analyzed two issues relevant to the field of reading test development. Using the test results of 200 seventh graders, we examined the possibility of identifying reading comprehension subskills and the effects…

The aim of this study was to examine whether low, average, and high comprehenders (LC, AC, and HC, respectively) differed in their reading self-confidence and bias ratings, and whether confidence ratings were driven by reading ability or distributed evenly among diverse readers. Seventy fourth-graders with good decoding abilities were administered…

Although eye movements have been used widely to investigate how skilled adult readers process written language, relatively little research has used this methodology with children. This is unfortunate as, as we discuss here, eye-movement studies have significant potential to inform our understanding of children's reading development. We consider…

The objective of this study was to examine why rapid automatized naming (RAN) is related to reading by manipulating processes involved at the input, processing, and output stages of its production. In total, 65 children in Grade 2 and 65 in Grade 6 were assessed on serial and discrete RAN (Digits and Objects), Cancellation, RAN Yes/No, and oral…

In this technical report, we present the results of a study to gather criterion-related evidence for Grade 2-5 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 Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests and the Dynamic…