Despite a longstanding awareness of academic language as a pedagogically relevant research area, the construct of academic language proficiency, understood as a more comprehensive set of skills than just academic vocabulary, has remained vaguely specified. In this study, we explore a more inclusive operationalization of an academic language proficiency construct, Core Academic Language Skills (CALS). CALS refers to a constellation of high-utility language skills hypothesized to support reading comprehension across school content areas.Using the CALS-I, a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust innovative instrument, we first examined the variability in students' CALS by grade, English proficiency designation, and socioeconomic status (SES). Then, we examined the contribution of CALS to reading comprehension using academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and sociodemographic factors as covariates. A linguistically and socioeconomically diverse crosssectional sample of 218 students (grades 4-6) participated in four assessments: the CALS-I, a standardized reading comprehension assessment (GMRT), an academic vocabulary test (VAT), and a word reading fluency test (TOSWRF). GLM analysis of variance revealed that CALS differed significantly by grade, English proficiency designation, and SES, with students in higher grades, English proficient students, and those from higher SES backgrounds displaying higher scores, on average. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses identified CALS as an independent predictor of reading comprehension, even after controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and socio-demographic factors. By specifying a set of language skills associated with reading comprehension, this study advances our understanding of schoolrelevant language skills, making them more visible for researchers and educators.

This study examined the effects of passage and presentation order on progress monitoring assessments of oral reading fluency in 134 second grade students. The students were randomly assigned to read six one minute passages in one of six fixed orders over a seven week period. The passages had been developed to be comparable based on readability formulae. Estimates of oral reading fluency varied across the six stories (67.9 to 93.9), but not as a function of presentation order. These passage effects altered the shape of growth trajectories and affected estimates of linear growth rates, but were shown to be removed when forms were equated. Explicit equating is essential to the development of equivalent forms, which can vary in difficulty despite high correlations across forms and apparent equivalence through readability indices. Fluency and Curriculum Based Measurement (CBM)Fluency, the ability to read text aloud with speed, accuracy, and prosody is an important skill in reading development (National Reading Panel; NRP, 2000;Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) It represents a directly observable analog to the automatic word recognition skills that support silent reading. While a struggling reader attends mainly to the process of decoding words in the text, a fluent reader expends less cognitive resources on decoding allowing the reader to concentrate on the meaning of the text. This relationship between fluency and comprehension has been argued theoretically (e.g., Perfetti's verbal efficiency theory, 1985) and studied empirically, where it has been shown across a variety of settings and contexts using different measures of fluency and comprehension, that a fluent reader is more likely to have better comprehension skills (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001;Young & Bowers, 1995;Nathan & Stanovich, 1991; LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). Because of the tight empirical and theoretical link between fluency and comprehension and the relative ease of assessing fluency over comprehension, fluency assessments are often used as proxies to monitor student growth in reading.Corresponding Author: David J. Francis, The University of Houston. dfrancis@uh.edu, 832.842.7036 Fax:713.747.7532. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM)Progress monitoring assessments of fluency are often used in the classroom to provide teachers and other professionals with regular feedback on students' rate of skill acquisition. Such assessments help to identify students needing modifications of their current instruction based on slower than expected rate...

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as core academic language skills (CALS). CALS refers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions that co-occur with school learning tasks across disciplines. Using an innovative instrument, we explored CALS in a cross-sectional sample of 235 students in Grades 4-8. The results revealed between-and within-grade variability in CALS. Psychometric analyses yielded strong reliability and supported the presence of a single CALS factor, which was

To date, the assessment of public health consequences of air pollution has largely focused on a single-pollutant approach aimed at estimating the increased risk of adverse health outcomes associated with the exposure to a single air pollutant, adjusted for the exposure to other air pollutants. However, air masses always contain many pollutants in differing amounts, depending on the types of emission sources and atmospheric conditions. Because humans are simultaneously exposed to a complex mixture of air pollutants, many organizations have encouraged moving towards “a multi-pollutant approach to air quality.” While there is general agreement that multi-pollutant approaches are desirable, the challenges of implementing them are vast. In this commentary, we discuss a multi-pollutant approach for controlling ambient air pollution that describes multi-pollutant concepts for different aspects of air quality management and science: (1) scientific estimation of the health risk of multiple pollutants; (2) setting of regulatory standards for multiple pollutants; and (3) simultaneously implementing compliance with regulatory standards for multiple pollutants.

PALs caused a myopic shift in peripheral defocus. Superior myopic defocus was associated with less central myopia progression. These data support the continued investigation of optical designs that result in peripheral myopic defocus as a potential way to slow myopia progression. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00335049.).