Kristi L. Santi

Form effects on the estimation of students' oral reading fluency using DIBELS.

This study examined the effects of passage and presentation order on progress monitoring assessments of oral reading fluency in 134 second grade students. The students were randomly assigned to read six one-minute passages in one of six fixed orders over a seven week period. The passages had been developed to be comparable based on readability formulas. Estimates of oral reading fluency varied across the six stories (67.9 to 93.9), but not as a function of presentation order. These passage effects altered the shape of growth trajectories and affected estimates of linear growth rates, but were shown to be removed when forms were equated. Explicit equating is essential to the development of equivalent forms, which can vary in difficulty despite high correlations across forms and apparent equivalence through readability indices.

The Timing of Early Reading Assessment in Kindergarten

Under the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind legislation, screening for reading risk has become routine in kindergarten. The objective of this study was to examine the effects of the timing of kindergarten assessment and the type of support provided to teachers to translate assessment results to instruction. Sixty-two schools with 201 kindergarten classrooms and 3,635 students in a southwestern state were randomly assigned to administer kindergarten assessment in the fall or in the winter, with teachers receiving onsite or web mentoring. A small, significant effect (d = 0.13) was found for outcomes on a standardized reading test administered at the end of kindergarten when teachers administered the screen in the fall and received web rather than onsite mentoring. A slight, nonsignificant, reduction in reading risk (i.e., reduction in false positives) was apparent. Given these small effects, there is little empirical support for initiating screening in the fall rather than in the winter of kindergarten.

Visual-motor integration skills: accuracy of predicting reading.

Purpose This article investigated the contribution of visual-motor integration (VMI) to reading ability when known predictors of later reading outcomes were also present in the data analysis. Methods Participants included 778 first and second grade students from a large diverse urban district in Texas. The data were analyzed using multiple regression models with a forced entry of predictors for each regression model, and each model was run separately for each outcome. Results The results indicate that VMI drops out of the prediction models once more reading- and language-specific skills are introduced. Conclusions Although VMI skills make a statistically significant contribution in some aspects of the regression model, the reduction in contribution reduces the predictive validity of VMI skills. Therefore, a VMI skill measure will not sufficiently determine if a child has a reading disability.

Developmental changes in reading do not alter the development of visual processing skills: an application of explanatory item response models in grades K-2

Visual processing has been widely studied in regard to its impact on a students’ ability to read. A less researched area is the role of reading in the development of visual processing skills. A cohort-sequential, accelerated-longitudinal design was utilized with 932 kindergarten, first, and second grade students to examine the impact of reading acquisition on the processing of various types of visual discrimination and visual motor test items. Students were assessed four times per year on a variety of reading measures and reading precursors and two popular measures of visual processing over a 3-year period. Explanatory item response models were used to examine the roles of person and item characteristics on changes in visual processing abilities and changes in item difficulties over time. Results showed different developmental patterns for five types of visual processing test items, but most importantly failed to show consistent effects of learning to read on changes in item difficulty. Thus, the present study failed to find support for the hypothesis that learning to read alters performance on measures of visual processing. Rather, visual processing and reading ability improved together over time with no evidence to suggest cross-domain influences from reading to visual processing. Results are discussed in the context of developmental theories of visual processing and brain-based research on the role of visual skills in learning to read.

Different Approaches to Equating Oral Reading Fluency Passages

Using curriculum-based measures (CBM) to identify and monitor students’ oral reading fluency (ORF) is challenging, with student performance subject to numerous sources of variability. One source of variability that is beyond teachers’ or students’ control stems from differences in text difficulty across CBM probes at any given grade level. These differences are referred to collectively as form effects on students’ ORF. This chapter examines the research on form effects and different solutions that have been discussed in the research literature for reducing or removing form effects from CBM assessments. These solutions are referred to collectively as equating methods. The chapter examines four different equating methods using data from a sample of 1867 students from grade 6–8 who were evaluated on subtests of the Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA) to illustrate the differences across the methods. These methods either focus on the equating of raw scores, or on the estimation of true fluency scores through the modeling of test forms. The raw score methods include linear and equipercentile equating, while the true score methods include linear and nonlinear equating using latent variables (LVs). The results are discussed in terms of their implications for developers and users of CBM assessments.

Special Education in Middle and High School

This chapter includes three sections addressing historical, current, and emerging issues in teaching reading comprehension to students with disabilities. The first section reviews special education law, statistics, and practices as they relate to middle and school. The second section reviews the information presented in the content area chapters and discusses how the information presented works with students in special education but receiving the majority of their content instruction (80 % or more of the day) in general education settings. The final section presents an overview of effective instructional practices in light of new issues being raised with instructional fidelity and the need to have students more actively engaged in reading diverse texts, including those that are computer-based.

Effects of Technology Enhancements and Type of Teacher Support on Assessing Spanish-Speaking Children’s Oral Reading Fluency in Second Grade

We examined student-, classroom-, and school-level effects in predicting second-grade Spanish-speaking children’s oral reading fluency in Spanish. Teachers in 67 randomly selected urban schools administered the Tejas LEE to 1,537 first- and second-grade students. Oral reading fluency was measured in the passages students read for comprehension. Covariates were mean fluency in Grade 1, variability in fluency in Grade 1, degree of grouping in the school, and the proportion of second-grade students in the classroom and/or the school taking the Tejas LEE. Treatment effects were administration format (paper, desktop, handheld) and type of teacher support (no mentoring, web mentoring, and on-site plus web mentoring). Second-grade teachers positively affected students’ reading fluency when (a) they administered the Tejas LEE on paper with the associated paper reports in classrooms of bilingual students, and (b) they either received web mentoring and had relatively homogeneous classrooms or received on-site or no mentoring and had ability-grouped classes. Implications for interpreting assessment results are discussed in the context of the type of support provided to teachers and the grouping of bilingual students by language and/or by ability.