The inclusion of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in schools is an ongoing challenge – it demands the development of an adapted teaching and learning environment, which, in turn, requires a corresponding teacher education programme. Studies indicate that personal characteristics of the respective teachers are one of the main influencing factors on the classroom environment. This article reports on a study of the role of teacher‐related factors, attitudes, concerns and efficacy in inclusion by testing existing survey instruments of 909 pre‐service teachers in Germany. A confirmatory factor analysis was applied to new German translations of four instruments: Attitudes Towards Inclusion Scale, Intention to Teach in Inclusive Classroom Scale, Concerns about Inclusive Education Scale, and the Teacher Efficacy for Inclusive Practices. With minor modifications, models demonstrated good fit measures and partial measurement invariance between special school pre‐service teachers and general pre‐service teachers. A combined model of all four scales confirmed that lower concerns were related to attitudes that are more positive, greater self‐efficacy and stronger intentions to teaching inclusively. Implications for teacher‐training and comparisons to other international samples are discussed.

Formative tests and assessments have high potential in supporting learning, especially for students with special educational needs. One approach to gain assessment information on student learning is to monitor learning progress. For that, multiple repeated tests are often performed by practitioners. In order to be useful in practice, tests must meet various interdependent quality criteria. A property of tests that touches various criteria as the utility and economy is the length. A test has to be long enough to give a meaningful, reliable and comparable measure but short enough to be usable in classroom situations. An approach to evaluate and minimize the length of a computer-based test on sentence comprehension is introduced. It is shown that the test can be shortened from eight to 5 min while the estimation of the student´s abilities remains relatively stable for a random item order and a fixed item order variant. The consequences of test development of progress monitoring and the procedure for test time reduction for the different quality criteria are outlined. An approach to evaluate and minimize the length of a computer-based test by using a one parameter logistic model on a test of sentence comprehension (N = 761) is introduced. The data and the syntax is published in the OSF project https://osf.io/hnbs8/.

Reading comprehension at sentence level is a core component in the students' comprehension development, but there is a lack of comprehension assessments at the sentence level, which respect the theory of reading comprehension. In this article, a new web-based sentence-comprehension assessment for German primary school students is developed and evaluated using a curriculum-based measurement (CBM) framework. The test focuses on sentence level reading comprehension as an intermediary between word and text comprehension. The construction builds upon the theory of reading comprehension using CBM-Maze techniques. It is consistent on all tasks and contains different syntactic and semantic structures within the items. This paper presents the test development, a description of the item performance, an analysis of its factor structure, and tests of measurement invariance, and group comparisons (i.e., across gender, immigration background, over two measurement points, and the presence of special educational needs; SEN). Third grade students (n = 761) with and without SEN finished two CBM tests over 3 weeks. Results reveal that items had good technical adequacy, the constructed test is unidimensional, and it is valid for students both with and without SEN. Similarly, it is valid for both sexes, and results are valid across both measurement points. We discuss our method for creating a unidimensional test based on multiple item difficulties and make recommendations for future test construction.

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In this study, poor readers in second school year were selected from three schools (n = 32). Their reading skills were surveyed weekly using a CBM instrument over one school semester. Furthermore, they were supported by a fiveweek reading fluency instruction. The majority of students increased their weekly learning growth in regular teaching and in the phase with the additive instruction. The weekly learning growth was higher in the phase with the additive instruction in reading syllables (b = 0.69), reading words (b = 0.44) and reading comprehension at sentence level (b = 0.45) than without (reading syllables: b = 0.49; reading words: b = 0.18; reading comprehension: b = 0.30). Based on the results of this study, the benefit of CBM for adaptive reading instruction will be discussed.