This article describes the development and administration of the "Kindergarten-Second Grade (K-2) Writing Data-Based Decision Making (DBDM) Survey." The "K-2 Writing DBDM Survey" was developed to learn more about current DBDM practices specific to early writing. A total of 376 educational professionals (175 general education…

There have been a handful of studies on kindergarteners' motivational beliefs about writing, yet measuring these beliefs in young children continues to pose a set of challenges. The purpose of this exploratory, mixed-methods study was to examine how kindergarteners understand and respond to different assessment formats designed to capture their…

The use of accommodations is often recommended to remove barriers to academic testing among English Learners (ELs). However, it is unclear whether accommodations are particularly effective at improving ELs' test scores. A growing foundation of empirical work has explored this topic. We conducted a meta-analysis that examined several possible…

The current study digitalised an assessment instrument of receptive vocabulary knowledge, GraWo-KiGa, for use in Austrian kindergartens. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study looks at 85 kindergarteners in their last year (age M = 5.79 years, 51.8% male, 71.8% L1 German), to find out (a) whether the form of digital assessment employed meets…

Research Findings Research suggests children from low-income environments have vocabularies that differ from those of their higher-income peers. They may have basic knowledge of many words of which children from higher income environments have acquired sub- or supra-ordinate knowledge. This study sought to determine if children from low-income…

This study investigated the effect of item position on descriptive statistics, psychometric information, and factor structure of the Pediatric Symptoms Checklist 17-item social-emotional screening instrument (PSC-17). The goal was to determine whether item position, either grouped by factor or mixed across constructs, produced similar results.…

The purpose of this study was to design an instrument for five- to six-year-old children to help measure their verbal reasoning skills and assess the validity and reliability of the resulting instrument. For this purpose, the researchers have created the Younger Children Verbal Reasoning Test (YCVR-test) and a control instrument, which have been…

This study tested how 53 kindergarteners' expressions of depth of vocabulary knowledge and use in novel contexts were related to in-context and out-of-context test formats for 16 target words. Applying multilevel, multi-categorical Logit to all 1,696 test item responses, the authors found that kindergarteners were more likely to express deep…

Background: Existing evidence suggests that young children with specific language impairment have unusual difficulty in detecting omissions of obligatory tense-marking morphemes, but little is known about adolescents' sensitivity to such violations. Aims: The study investigated whether limitations in receptive morphosyntax (as measured by…

This paper undertakes a review of the literature on writing cognition, writing instruction, and writing assessment with the goal of developing a framework and competency model for a new approach to writing assessment. The model developed is part of the Cognitively Based Assessments of, for, and as Learning (CBAL) initiative, an ongoing research…