The assessment of early literacy and numeracy skills can provide useful and important information in pursuance of the goal to increase student academic achievement. At present, there have been promising results using curriculum-based measurement (CBM) for evaluating early literacy and early numeracy. There has been little research investigating the use of both early literacy and numeracy CBM-type skills assessments in a comprehensive battery. This research extends previous research by investigating the internal validity of an assessment battery of literacy and numeracy skills assessed at the end of kindergarten and external validity in the form of predictive validity for second-grade outcomes in reading and mathematics. Results suggest that correlated factors representing early literacy and numeracy skills are being measured. Evidence of convergent and incremental predictive validity with respect to later reading and mathematics outcomes was strong, but discriminant validity was not substantiated.
The assessment of early literacy skills during the kindergarten year can provide useful information about student performance in prereading skills, which are predictors of later reading achievement. This study examined the use of fluency-based prompts of student phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, and oral reading at the end of kindergarten for predicting later reading achievement at the end of second grade. Predictive validity and bias studies were undertaken with respect to English-language learners (ELLs) and four selected ethnic subgroups: European American (EA), African American (AA), Asian American (AsA), and Hispanic American (HA). Results indicated that the predictive validity of the early literacy measures was strong, and no evidence of predictive bias for ELL and non-ELL groups was found. However, evidence of a small amount of predictive bias was found between the EA and HA students with respect to intercept differences.
Previous research has provided evidence for the utility of the Minneapolis Kindergarten Assessment (MKA), which is a measure of early literacy and numeracy skills. The present research was undertaken to replicate previous factorial results and evaluate the relative strength of an alternative parameterization of the measurement model, the bifactor model, which was posited to correct for anomalies found in the research literature. In addition, predictive validity evidence was ascertained to evaluate the extent to which two different factorial structures differed when making predictions about later reading and mathematics outcomes. Results suggested the bifactor model provided a useful measurement model conceptualization and also provided a strong predictive model for later reading and mathematics.
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