A study evaluated the validity of the Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) grade-3 reading assessment from 2 perspectives: its relationship to 21 other measures of reading via factor analyses, and the sensitivity of the IGAP to instruction in 3 schools via multiple regression. Data were collected in a longitudinal study involving 350 students.…

The summary information in this report provides teachers, school administrators, students, and the general public in Alberta, Canada with an overview of results from the January 1997 administration of the English 33 Diploma Examination. The information in the report is most helpful when used in conjunction with the detailed school and jurisdiction…

Among the measurement techniques receiving greater attention is the context-dependent item set or testlet. The context-dependent item set consists of a scenario and related test questions. This item format is generally believed to be able to tap higher level thinking. Unfortunately, this item form leads to inter-item dependence within item sets…

Providing 66 ready-to-use informal diagnostic tests and other evaluative aids, this book helps reading specialists and classroom teachers identify students' individual reading problems to prescribe effective corrective or remedial instruction. Each test in the book is printed in a full-page format and is ready to duplicate as many times as needed…

The summary information in this report provides teachers, school administrators, students, and the general public in Alberta, Canada with an overview of results from the June 1998 administration of the English 30 Diploma Examination. The information in the report is most helpful when used in conjunction with the detailed school and jurisdiction…

Intended as a comprehensive collection of knowledge about managing college-level reading and study strategy programs for practitioners, administrators, and researchers, this book provides a review of the theoretical, empirical, and programmatic issues in the field. Chapter 1 ("Reading, Writing, and Academic Literacy" by Sharon L. Pugh…

The merits and disadvantages of standardized and informal reading tests for limited English proficient readers are discussed. A growing reliance on standardized ("formal") tests due to their ease of administration and scoring is criticized because the tests are seen as: inadequate for describing students at high and low ends of the scale; not…

This study examined whether and to what extent the characteristics of mental models derived from the identical text, which is known to produce a certain type of mental model, are influenced if the subjects are given different task expectations before the reading session. Seventy-one undergraduates read one of the two text genres, descriptive or…

This paper summarizes an investigation of the format used for equating the 1993 Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) sixth grade reading test. In 1992, each student took only one test, either a narrative test or an expository test. In 1993, there was only one test, which included both formats. Several possible approaches for linking the 1993…

To investigate the causes of variation in cloze-comprehension test correlations, a reanalysis was conducted of the influential J.R. Bormuth study (1962), which reported correlations between nine cloze and nine comprehension tests administered to 50 subjects in grades 4, 5, and 6. Two separate renalayses were completed in the present study, the…

A study was conducted at St. Louis Community College to validate the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT), Form C, as an instrument for student placement, to empirically establish a cutoff score for a mandatory reading improvement program, and to provide more complete and meaningful feedback to students about their reading test results. The study…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of creating a short form of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) for use in a clinical setting with disabled readers. The subjects were 100 clients ages six to sixteen of the Belser-Parton Reading Center at the University of Alabama whose files contained scores…

This study demonstrated that 49 teen-age high school tutors, under the guidance and assistance of competent reading consultants, could bring about gains in the reading achievement of 215 elementary school children reading at least one year below their grade level. (CS)

This paper extends the theory of conditional covariances to polytomous items. It has been mathematically proven that under some mild conditions, commonly assumed in the analysis of response data, the conditional covariance of two items, dichotomously or polytomously scored, is positive if the two items are dimensionally homogeneous and negative…

Research on military reading abilities has shown a direct relationship between reading ability and training and job performance. The objectives of this study of the development of a reading scale were to: (1) measure the reading ability of military applicants using six commonly used reading tests; (2) use the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude…