A longitudinal approach is demonstrated that allows assessment of: the means by which a student's level and rate of learning in a given subject area compare with the level and rate of learning of other students, and each student's relative strengths and weaknesses across subject areas. The approach involves an individual growth model to estimate…

This study added extraneous information and increased syntactical complexity to determine the relative importance of computational and reading abilities in solving arithmetic word problems. Analyzing tests of 200 sixth graders indicated the combined abilities accounted for 54 percent of the variance in solution accuracy. (BS)