Textbooks remain as major learning aids in all levels of education worldwide. Thus, textbooks must constantly be subjected to critical analysis in order to establish their curricular usefulness. This paper analyzed four commercial science textbooks designed for third grade Filipino learners. The four textbooks were analyzed according to…

The purpose of this study was to examine moment-by-moment fluctuations in text comprehension processing and determine how and when poor and good comprehenders differ. To do so, we reanalyzed a dataset of think-aloud protocols from 138 intermediate elementary students. Both good and poor comprehenders used a variety of processing strategies when…

Despite prevalent use and practical application, the current and standard assessment of oral reading fluency (ORF) presents considerable limitations which reduces its validity in estimating growth and monitoring student progress, including: (a) high cost of implementation; (b) tenuous passage equivalence; and (c) bias, large standard error, and…

This study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1-6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade…

This study examined the number of writing samples needed to obtain a reliable estimate of young struggling writers' capabilities. It further assessed if performance in one genre was reflective of performance in other genres for these children. Second- and third-grade students (81 boys, 56 girls), who were identified as struggling writers in need…

Given the deficiencies of readability formulae as reliable tools for measuring text readability in educational settings, this study aims to offer a new measure to improve the current methods of testing the readability levels of texts through the incorporation of the newly-developed concept of emotioncy. To this end, a group of 221 students were…

The widely adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS) call for raising the level of text complexity in textbooks and reading materials used by students across all grade levels in the United States; the authors of the English Language Arts component of the CCSS build their case for higher complexity in part upon a research base they say shows a…

The Common Core Standards for the English Language Arts (CCSS) provide explicit guidelines matching grade-level bands (e.g., 2-3, 4-5) with targeted text complexity levels. The CCSS staircase accelerates text expectations for students across Grades 2-12 in order to close a gap in the complexity of texts typically used in high school and those of…

The use of oral reading fluency (ORF) passages within a Response to Intervention (RTI) framework is examined. Significant limitations within the current ORF research are discussed. The passage equivalency and readability scores for DIBELS Next, AIMSweb, and a school district's curriculum's ORF passages are evaluated using Generalizability Theory…

While the English language boasts a century of research into its most frequently-used words, no such attempt has ever formally been made in the Arab world. This pioneering study presents a list of 500 commonly-used words in the Arabic language based on compilations of words gathered from a number of popular reading series in Lebanon, spanning…

The "Common Core State Standards/English Language Arts" include the ability to become increasingly more capable with complex text over the school career, redirecting attention to the measurement of text complexity. While suggesting multiple criteria, the Standards offer a single measure of text complexity--Lexiles. Additional…

Curriculum-based measurement of reading (CBM-R) is used to estimate oral reading fluency. Unlike many traditional published tests, CBM-R materials are often comprised of 20 to 30 alternate forms/passages. Historically, CBM-R assessment materials were sampled from curricular materials. Recent research has documented the potentially deleterious…