Educational assessments, from kindergarden to 12th grade (K-12) to licensure, have a long, well-documented history of oppression and marginalization. In this paper, we (the authors) ask the field of educational assessment/measurement to actively disrupt the White supremacist and racist logics that fuel this marginalization and re-orient itself…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate the initial reliability and validity evidence of the dynamic assessment (DA) of early reading and language as a second-stage screener in kindergarten, the first year of formal schooling. The DA comprises three subtests that capture students' ability to learn letter sounds and blending…

Purpose: Using a longitudinal design, the present study evaluated the utility of the picture sequences in the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) for assessing Mandarin-speaking children's narrative skills from kindergarten through Grade 2 in Taiwan. Method: Participants were 27 children with typical language (TL) and 22 with…

Over a 6-year period, a sociolinguistic and sociocultural project was undertaken by Alaska Native expert educators and linguists (aka the Yup'ik Expert Group) from the Yup'ik community in the Lower Kuskokwim School District, Central Alaska. The native experts developed their own culturally sustainable, valid, and reliable Kindergarten through…

Various stakeholders, such as policymakers and educators, require diagnostic feedback and actionable test results. One particular context in which fine-grained test results are of utmost importance is English language proficiency (ELP) assessments as they are used for critical decisions for students. Diagnostic classification models (DCMs) afford…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

In the US K-12 public school settings, each state's annual English language proficiency (ELP) assessment, as part of an educational accountability system, has tremendous impact on English learner (EL) students' academic paths and success. It is thus critical to establish a robust validation framework and empirical evidence to ensure that states'…

Vocabulary skills are important for overall reading competence, but vocabulary assessment approaches that inform instructional decision-making and are sensitive to improvement are limited. This article describes a process for developing vocabulary measures designed to facilitate data-driven decision-making for kindergarten and first-grade students…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the underlying components or factor structure of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014) sentence repetition task and (b) to examine the relationship between Spanish-English speaking children's sentence repetition and…

This study examined the relative contributions of Latino/a children's (N = 102) school readiness and early literacy skills during kindergarten in predicting first grade reading achievement. By using discriminant function analyses, the current study identified a set of areas to assess that could be used to effectively screen children during…

Since the easyCBM© learning system was first published in 2006, over $8 million of federal funding (both from the Office of Special Education Programs and more recently from the Institute of Education Sciences) has been used to develop, study, and refine the assessments available on the system. This Technical Manual summarizes the ongoing research…

The Arizona English Language Learners Assessment (AZELLA) is used by the Arizona Department of Education to determine which children should receive English support services. AZELLA results are used to determine if children are either proficient in English or have English language skills in one of four non-proficient categories (pre-emergent,…

Current assessment practices in the United States are not able to accurately capture the total linguistic, cognitive, and achievement abilities of bilingual learners. There are psychometric complexities involved when assessing and interpreting test results of bilingual students, which impact the validity of this practice. Further, the compromise…

Purpose: This study asked if children's performance on language tests reflects different dimensions of language and if this dimensionality changes with development. Method: Children were given standardized language batteries at kindergarten and at second, fourth, and eighth grades. A revised modified parallel analysis was used to determine the…