This study examined the efficacy of an after-school program, the Challenging Horizons Program (CHP), that met four days a week and focused on improving organization, academic skills, and classroom behavior. The CHP was compared with a community control that included involvement in a district-run after-school program that met one to three days a week and focused on preparation for standardized testing. Participants were 48 middle-school youth, referred as experiencing a combination of learning and behavior problems, randomly assigned to either the CHP or the control. Parent and teacher ratings of behavioral and academic functioning were collected at the beginning of the academic year and again after one semester of intervention. Relative to the control, participants in the CHP made significant improvements in parent-rated academic progress, self-esteem, and overall severity of problem. While teacher ratings did not reach significance, CHP participants

Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) is a direct method of academic assessment used to screen and evaluate students’ skills and monitor their responses to academic instruction and intervention. Interventioncentral.org offers a math worksheet generator at no cost that creates randomly generated math curriculum-based measures (M-CBMs). In this study, we examined the test–retest reliability and alternate-form reliability of four parallel, randomly generated M-CBMs designed to assess multiple arithmetic skills (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division). The participants (N = 283 sixth-grade students) completed each M-CBM worksheet twice during a semester. According to our results, these M-CBMs have moderate test–retest and alternate-form reliability. Applying the Spearman–Brown Prophecy Formula revealed that aggregating M-CBMs increases the reliability of these measures to acceptable levels for progress monitoring (i.e., above .80).