The Technical Properties of Science Content Maze Passages for Middle School Students

Abstract

The use of Curriculum-Based Measures is rapidly expanding to the middle school level, where maze passages are frequently used to monitor progress in reading. At secondary grade levels, the focus of reading is on reading to learn, especially in the content areas. Therefore, we were interested in developing maze passages based on grade-level science texts to determine whether maze passages constructed from expository texts would have sufficient reliability and validity to serve as reading and science benchmarking tools. Participants included 367 seventh-grade students from three states. Students completed eight maze passages over three testing periods, a reading measure at two testing periods, and 182 students completed a science state assessment. Alternate form reliability of the science maze passages ranged from .56 to .80. Concurrent and predictive correlation coefficients with other measures ranged from .63 to .67. Implications for practice and research are discussed

A Comparison of Readability and Understandability in Second Language Acquisition Textbooks for Pre-service EFL Teachers

“…Maze has also been found to be a useful measure of expository text comprehension (Gillingham & Garner, 1992;Tichá, Espin, & Wayman, 2009). Maze passages created from content area textbooks identify students who struggle with academic content reading and correlate with other reading and science assessments (Johnson, Semmelroth, Allison, & Fritsch, 2013;Tolar et al, 2012).…”

Statement verification for science

“…No items representing the engineering and technology domain were identified for either Form A or B. those related to evidence of validity were less than desired. Bivariate correlations tended to be lower for both reliability and evidence of validity for SV-S than for those for other CBM tools for use in content areas (e.g., Espin et al, 2001;Espin et al, 2005;Mooney et al, 2010;Mooney et al, 2013;Johnson et al, 2013). However, results were comparable for students in the Hold Out and Validation sets in Grades 7 and 8.…”

“…Despite the research support for vocabulary matching some have argued that the novel task -requiring fairly substantial amount of teacher effort to create -may be less appealing than the more familiar maze selection task (see Johnson, Semmelroth, Allison, & Fritsch, 2013).…”

“…Internal consistency for the two attribute maze probes used were low (α = .27 to .52; α = .22 to .31). Johnson et al (2013) suggested the use of maze selection for this purpose continue to be researched. While their results support such a suggestion, research regarding students' reading comprehension (i.e., SVT) may also provide insight into how CBM principles can be applied in content areas.…”

“…Regarding vocabulary matching, it can be challenging to develop appropriate distractors as well as to develop the task itself as noted by Johnson et al (2013). In addition, vocabulary matching may be a measure of one's reading ability with a limited loading on one's knowledge of content being present.…”