Teaching reading has been an ongoing challenge for many educators across the United States. Numerous studies suggest that teachers feel they were not adequately prepared to teach reading and have low efficacy in delivering literacy instruction. Teaching reading requires educators to be knowledgeable about the alphabetic principle, decoding new…

Researchers in many disciplines work with ranking data. This data type is unique in that it is often deterministic in nature (the ranks of items "k"-1 determine the rank of item "k"), and the difference in a pair of rank scores separated by "k" units is equivalent regardless of the actual values of the two ranks in…