In this study, we examined the development of beginning writing skills in kindergarten children and the contribution of spelling and handwriting to these writing skills after accounting for early language, literacy, cognitive skills, and student characteristics. Two hundred and forty two children were given a battery of cognitive, oral language, reading, and writing measures. They exhibited a range of competency in spelling, handwriting, written expression, and in their ability to express ideas. Handwriting and spelling made statistically significant contributions to written expression, demonstrating the importance of these lower-order transcription skills to higher order text-generation skills from a very early age. The contributions of oral language and reading skills were not significant. Implications of these findings for writing development and instruction are addressed.

Frequently, students with emotional and behavior disorders (EBD) exhibit academic underachievement combined with high levels of externalizing behaviors and resistance to instructional efforts. Regardless of the present reading initiatives, research focusing on interventions for teaching reading to students with EBD continues to be limited. This article extends previous efforts to review literature concerning reading instruction interventions for students with EBD. Specifically, this review focuses on interventions employed in primary grades. Because of the paucity in research and documented issues related to late and misidentification of students with EBD, studies including students at risk of antisocial behaviors were included. Eleven studies were found and carefully reviewed. Results demonstrate the efficacy of several reading interventions, including Direct Instruction, peer tutoring, and behaviorally based procedures such as time delay prompting, trial and error, and differential reinforcement.

In the Arab region, several assessments are available to evaluate student skills in mathematical computations. However, none of them uses formative evaluation to guide universal screening of struggling learners or students with learning disability (LD). The current study aimed to develop mathematical computation curriculum-based measurement (MC-CBM) for Arab speaking fourth grade students, examine its psychometric properties, test its adequacy for use in an Arab context, namely Oman, determine an adequate time for its administration, and develop performance benchmarks. MC-CBM were administered to 528 fourth grade students. Results indicated that the developed measures were adequate for use in the Arab context. Received operation characteristic (ROC) curve indicated good specificity and sensitivity estimates for the MC-CBM. Performance benchmarks were obtained using the 25th and 75th percentiles. Implications are discussed from a contextual perspective.