Pre-service teachers' reading habits and their literacy abilities affect their views toward teaching reading and writing and how they implement literacy instruction. This study explored the relationship between the past and current reading habits of pre-service teachers in relation to their reading and writing abilities. Participating teacher…

Testing accommodations have become a common component of services for students with disabilities at all levels of education. This study examined the effect of a common testing accommodation--extended time--on the reading comprehension test performance of high school students. Sixty-four students, half of whom had learning disabilities (LDs) in the…

Working-memory capacity, strategy instruction, and timing of estimates were investigated for their effects on absolute monitoring accuracy, which is the difference between estimated and actual reading comprehension test performance. Participants read two expository texts under one of two randomly assigned reading strategy instruction conditions…

The "Second Annual National Survey on Assessments and Accommodations for Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing" investigated the types of testing accommodations used on 2004-2005 statewide standardized assessments as well as recommendations for best practices. A total of 444 participants who served over 9,000 students as teachers,…

Reading fluency in deaf children whose primary mode of communication is visual, whether English-like or American Sign Language, is difficult to measure since most measures of fluency require a child to read aloud. This article opens the discussion of a new construct, namely, signed reading fluency (i.e., rendering of printed text in a visually…

We report the results of a test-retest and alternate form reliability study of grade 1, 3, 5, and 8 reading measures from the easyCBM assessment system. Approximately 50 students in each grade participated in the study. In Grade 1, we studied the following measures: Phoneme Segmenting, Letter Sounds, Letter Names, Word Reading Fluency, and Passage…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a read-aloud test change administered with the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test (GMRT) on the underlying constructs measured by the Comprehension subtest. The study evaluated the factor structures for the Level 4 Comprehension subtest given to a sample of New Jersey fourth-grade students with…

In operational testing programs using item response theory (IRT), item parameter invariance is threatened when an item appears in a different location on the live test than it did when it was field tested. This study utilizes data from a large state's assessments to model change in Rasch item difficulty (RID) as a function of item position change,…

The relationships between cognitive and reading measures in third and fourth grade children were analyzed using path modeling. Third graders were tested in word identification, pseudo word reading, orthographic speed, rapid naming, and oral vocabulary knowledge. In third and fourth grades, the students were tested in oral reading fluency and in…

Deaf students consistently score lower on standardized measures of reading comprehension than their hearing peers. Most of the studies that have been conducted to explain this phenomenon have focused on variables within the reader, and important differences have been found between deaf and hearing readers. More recently, in the face of…

Every year 1.3 million U.S. high school students drop out of school with one quarter of female students failing to graduate on time. Female dropouts are more likely to be unemployed, to earn less when they are employed, to become pregnant before the age of 20, to become obese, to smoke, and to drink more heavily than their male counterparts. This…

Educational progress has been moving in the right direction for several years in Alabama. Now, with the implementation of Alabama's own Plan 2020, an even higher level of accountability for students, teachers, administrators, support systems, and schools/school systems, Alabama is poised to experience unprecedented growth. Add to that, the Alabama…

The Maine Department of Education wanted to use longitudinal data from its data system to better understand whether and how student and school characteristics are associated with student performance on the state-mandated Maine High School Assessment (MHSA). It was particularly interested in understanding the factors associated with changes in test…

The three-fold purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the impact of the computer-based reading program Fast ForWord (FFW) on the reading achievement of second-grade students in an Ohio school district. The sample included 360 students (treatment group, n = 85; control group, n = 275) from four elementary buildings. FFW is an…

This study was undertaken as an attempt to assess the effects of storytelling and reading aloud on fourth and fifth grade children's comprehension and oral reading fluency of both narrative and expository texts. The independent variable involved two strategies for introducing stories to children (storytelling and story reading) and a comparison…