Recent studies have documented positive effects for early intervention in improving the mathematics performance of low-achieving children. Consequently, educators need technically sound mathematics screening measures to identify children at risk and then intervene to improve achievement. In this article, we describe preliminary technical adequacy evidence for four early numeracy measures (number identification, quantity discrimination, quantity array, and missing number). We assessed over 300 kindergarten and first-grade students in two states to evaluate the reliability and criterion validity of the four measures. Fall and spring administrations of the measures for one subgroup provided preliminary evidence of students' growth on the measures over time. The results supported three of the four measures as potential tools for screening in the early grades.

In this study, we examined the reliability and validity of curriculum-based measures (CBM) in reading for indexing the performance of secondary-school students. Participants were 236 eighth-grade students (134 females and 102 males) in the classrooms of 17 English teachers. Students completed 1-, 2-, and 3-minute reading aloud and 2-, 3-, and 4-minute maze selection tasks. The relation between performance on the CBMs and the state reading test were examined. Results revealed that both reading aloud and maze selection were reliable and valid predictors of performance on the state standards tests, with validity coefficients above .70. An exploratory follow-up study was conducted in which the growth curves produced by the reading-aloud and maze-selection measures were compared for a subset of 31 students from the original study. For these 31 students, maze selection reflected change over time whereas reading aloud did not. This pattern of results was found for both lower-and higher-performing students. Results suggest that it is important to consider both performance and progress when examining the technical adequacy of CBMs. Implications for the use of measures with secondary-level students for progress monitoring are discussed.

In this study we compared alternative measures of early writing performance to identify an indicator of writing proficiency that teachers could use to monitor student growth and evaluate instructional effectiveness. The participants were 15 second-grade students in a summer school program for students at risk. The performance sampled was word copying, sentence copying, word dictation, and sentence dictation. Two-to three-minute samples of performance were obtained and several different scores were examined. The criterion validity of the early writing measures was examined using both global judgments of competence and quantitative scoring of story writing as criteria. Writing from word and sentence dictation entered into very high correlations with both criteria, showing promise as indicators of early writing proficiency. The results are discussed in terms of desirable features of assessment procedures including technical adequacy, administrative efficiency, and consumer acceptability.

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