The Common Core State Standards Initiative will enter a critical period during the 2014-15 school year. Several states have recently reversed course on adoption of the mathematics and English/language arts standards, as vocal opposition gains prominence elsewhere. Despite fraying of the two national consortia developing assessments tied to the new…

Designed to measure attitudes toward reading at any specific point and to measure changes in attitude toward reading, this instrument consists of twenty items selected from "An Inventory of Reading Attitude" devised by the Department of Education in San Diego, California. These items were modified by being stated in behavioral terms and…

Designed to index the kinds of meaning relationships that children perceive to exist between words and their references, this test consists of 276 pairs comprising 24 categories. For each item of the test, the subjects were asked to rank each pair of statements depending on how well they thought the words on the left were described. Content…

This instrument was designed to determine whether by structuring and sequencing monosyllabic English words in two different patterns--administered with the same control procedures--first-grade children would be aided in detecting, identifying, and discriminating among single vowels and their combined forms; in associating them with their specific…

Designed to assess the ability of subjects to apply concrete operations to data in a reading format, and to determine if there is any difference with regard to type of paragraph or type of question, this test consists of four short paragraphs, each of which established one of the following operations: an additive classification, a multiplicative…

Designed to investigate how the beginning reader understands the antecedent/anaphora relationship in written discourse, this test contains four stories which were drawn from basal readers and modified so that the categories of pronouns were represented in proportion to their occurrence in the basal readers. Stories were further modified so that…

Designed to describe and categorize the topics in a classroom or small-group discussion of literature, this instrument is a content analysis scheme. After segmenting into statements the typed transcript of an audio-recorded literature discussion, the researcher categorizes each statement into one of four categories--position, nature, stance, and…

Designed to assess teachers' attitudes toward writing and the teaching of writing, this questionnaire consists of two parts. The first section covers the personal, educational, and professional background of the informant, while the second section contains 55 statements eliciting the informant's opinion--with a range of five options--about…

Designed to measure specific dimensions of reading comprehension, the items for this test are based on a comprehension model which suggests that comprehension can be defined as six different skill areas: vocabulary, syntax, item recall, item sequence, interpretation, and evaluation. The test is divided into sections to correspond to each of the…

Designed to measure the acquisition of syntactic structures in kindergarten, first, and second graders, this test examines specific linguistic structures which appear to be acquired during the early elementary school years. Thirty-six sentences of equal length, consisting of words from a first-grade word list, are used to examine fifteen…

Designed to investigate the understanding of the linguistic form that connects a clause to another clause or another word, the test contains four sections. The students are instructed to read the first part of a sentence and then choose the answer which best completes that sentence. Each multiple choice item contains the correct answer and three…

Designed to assess teachers" attitudes toward a variety of objectives for teaching drama, the "Place of Drama" questionnaire contains 32 items. A principal component factor analysis of results from a large-scale tryout yielded the following categories among the items: noncognitive personal development, ethical growth, literary…

Based on research findings which suggest that stop and nasal sounds are difficult to discriminate by some children in the beginning years of school, this test is designed to appraise the ability of children to discriminate fine differentiations of stop and nasal sounds in minimal word-pair items. The major criteria for choice of test items were…

These indexes, a set of measures of growth in syntactic fluency, are derived from the research in written syntax of Hunt and Christensen. They are a means of linguistic analysis of each T-unit (independent clause and its modifiers) in a writing sample. The indexes include: mean T-unit length; number of words in free modifiers, final position only;…

Designed to measure comprehension of intact and deleted sentence structures corresponding to selected deletion transformation rules, this test is intended to be used with primary age children. Eight test passages were constructed at each of the first reader and high second reader levels from stories in the Ginn Basic Reader so that each passage…