Date of Award

1-2011

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Department

Special Education and Literacy Studies

First Advisor

Dr. Kristal Ehrhardt

Abstract

Currently there is no agreed-upon method for determining the difficulty level, referred to as the readability level, of Reading Curriculum-Based Measurement (R-CBM) passages. A key tenant of R-CBM is that the passages across each grade level are equivalent in difficulty level and therefore can be used to monitor student academic improvement. The primary objective in this study was to evaluate the homogeneity of oral reading fluency progress monitoring passages of two popular passage sets that are used frequently in schools. The purpose of this research was to examine the stability of each R-CBM progress monitoring passage set as well as determine whether there is any benefit to organizing the progress monitoring passages into triad sets for interpretation. The results indicated even with the most current methods of equating progress monitoring passages, error related to passage difficulty continues to persist. It is clear that using strong tactics such as a well developed readability formulas, as well as field testing passages, leads to a better equated passage set. In addition, analyzing progress once there has been three assessments given across time, rather than after each individual progress monitoring session, leads to considerably better information regarding student reading growth with reduced error related to passage difficulty level.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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