We conducted a skills analysis on written expression curriculum-based measurement (WE-CBM) tasks completed by 117 second-grade students. As part of the skills analysis, we scored two WE-CBM tasks (i.e., narrative and expository) for correct and incorrect writing sequences, common writing errors, and sentence structures. Although a majority of…

Often, the classification of words does not go beyond "difficult" (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or "easy" (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word properties into seven clusters of words. Each cluster…

In the beginning of the first decade of this century, some highly-publicized extremistic acts of terror occurred. A hostage tragedy in a school in Beslan (North Ossetia) was followed in the Netherlands by the brutal murder of the controversial Dutch filmmaker and newspaper columnist Theo van Gogh, bomb attacks in Bali and Madrid and other acts of…

Introduction: Computers and other technological instruments in general have become a more common practice in our schools nowadays, and Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) has been recently provided in various formats from kindergartens on. It can help children at-risk for learning disabilities. Method: This study investigated the effectiveness of…

We examined the relationship between rapid naming speed (RAN) and Chinese character recognition accuracy and fluency. Sixty-three grade 2 and 54 grade 4 Taiwanese children were administered four RAN tasks (colors, digits, Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, characters), and two character recognition tasks. RAN tasks accounted for more reading variance in grade 4 than…

Fourth graders with learning disabilities in transcription (handwriting and spelling), LD-TD, and without LD-TD (non-LD), were compared on three writing tasks (letters, sentences, and essays), which differed by level of language, when writing by pen and by keyboard. The two groups did not differ significantly in Verbal IQ but did in handwriting,…

This study examined the effects of task difficulty on on-task behavior for four students exhibiting low levels of math performance and on-task behavior. Curriculum-based assessments were conducted with each student to define the difficulty level of math tasks for each student based on the individual's rate of accurate performance on computational…

The relation between Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) and reading comprehension at the end of first grade and second grade was examined in a sample of 1,518 first-grade students from a large urban school district. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analyses were used to determine optimal DIBELS cut scores for…