The Performance Standards of the Oregon Certificate of Initial Mastery are described and discussed. Performance standards define how well students must perform on classroom and state assessments that lead to Oregon's Certificate of Initial Mastery. Students must complete classroom and state assessments that show what they know and can do in…

The Clark County (Nevada) School District introduced performance assessments into its assessment program for grades one through six as part of an effort to bring the assessment program in line with the revised curriculum. To study the effectiveness of these assessments, reading performance assessment results for grades three through five were…

This collection of descriptions of research at the Center for Research on Effective Schooling for Disadvantaged Students opens with the discussion of a synthesis of research on the effects of one-to-one tutoring programs used in first grade to prevent reading failure produced by Barbara Wasik and Robert Slavin. The synthesis reviews stringent…

A study investigated the effects of strategy instruction on the reading and writing abilities of sixth-grade middle-school students with delayed literacy. An experimental group of 10 sixth-grade, English-speaking inner-city students in the midwestern United States was matched on race, gender, and reading comprehension test scores with 10…

The Ohio State Literacy Survey, which assessed Ohio adults' literacy skills according to their performance on tasks reflecting the materials/demands encountered in daily life, was administered to a sample of 1,568 persons aged 16 years or older who were randomly selected from Ohio's approximately 8.3 million adults. Each participant received…

A study examined how students make specific inferences from prose passages. Subjects, 44 first- and second-year college students and 40 seventh-grade students, read 3 prose passages, each containing 6 inferential questions. The premise information for each question was expressed in one of six deductive inference forms: transitive, exclusive…

A study reviewed the effects of the whole language movement. Two forms of analysis were used: meta-analysis, and a simple "vote-counting" procedure. Quantitative studies that compared a whole language and a traditional (or basal reading) approach, published between 1988 and 1993, were selected for analysis. A total of 45 studies were…

Parents in affluent communities have been following the suggestion of research and delaying kindergarten entry of their young age-eligible children in order to increase the likelihood of the child's academic success. This study examined the correlation between the chronological age of a child entering kindergarten and his or her performance on…

A study compared the comprehension abilities of readers when reading narrative and expository discourse. It was designed to investigate how middle-level high-achieving and low-achieving readers comprehend the two discourse genres, testing the readers' comprehension of main ideas in the text under both conditions. Also examined was whether…

This report describes a program for using graphic organizers to enhance reading comprehension in the content areas. The targeted population consisted of middle school students in regular education classes at four different locations in a large metropolitan area. Graphic organizers will aid visually/spatially talented students as well as…

A study investigated the reliability, validity, and sensitivity of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) reading (which relates reading fluency to reading comprehension) with bilingual Hispanic students. For 10 weeks, 50 second-grade bilingual students and 26 students who spoke English only were administered CBM reading measures twice weekly.…

This sampler discusses California's English-language arts assessment program and presents examples of middle grades reading assessments, writing assessments, and writing prompts. The first section of the sampler takes an integrated look at the changes which make up the new English-language arts assessment. The second section presents the scoring…

Each spring, the New York City Public Schools conduct evaluations of first-graders to determine which students are in need of remedial reading and mathematics programs. A new measure was designed to be more reliable than the multiple-choice, standardized tests used previously. A checklist of 20 items relating to language arts, reading, and…

The 251 reading tests cited in this bibliography are used to assess various reading skills such as comprehension, oral reading, silent reading, and independent reading. Some of the reading tests are part of overall achievement batteries. This bibliography does not include reading readiness or diagnostic tests. Although grades kindergarten through…

A program was designed to improve the reading achievement of second grade students in a rural Georgia school. An analysis of the problem indicated that: a higher percentage of second grade students from low socioeconomic conditions scored lower on standardized reading achievement tests than other second grade students; students who scored lower…