Assessing oral reading fluency within and across grade levels: Development of equated test forms

Abstract

Deficits in oral reading fluency (ORF) impair reading comprehension and tend to persevere throughout schooling. Therefore, the assessment and monitoring of the students' performance in ORF across time should be routinely performed to guide the instruction and intervention. The goal of this work was to develop and validate a test of ORF for Portuguese students from grades 1 to 6 (TAF -Teste de Avaliação da Fluência) that includes specific test forms for each grade level with equated scores that allow comparison across multiple assessment points. In study 1 (N = 1166), the chained equipercentile equating method was performed to equate the test forms' scores horizontally and vertically. The tests of differences performed using the equated scores indicated that they were similar within the same grade level but increased significantly across grade levels.In study 2 (N = 549), reliability and validity evidence for the test forms was collected. Test-retest correlations were higher than .90, suggesting a high stability of the scores. Significant correlations between the TAF scores and the ones obtained in other reading tests, teachers' judgments, and school outcomes, were obtained, thus providing evidence of validity for the developed test forms. This instrument allows not only interindividual comparisons but also the assessment of intra-individual changes in ORF across time or as a result of intervention programs, while avoiding learning effects that arise when the same measure is administered multiple times.

From A to Z: Effects of a 2nd-grade reading intervention program for struggling readers

“…The involvement of students from the intervention group (IG) and the control group (CG) was conducted according to the following process: (1) at the beginning of the school year, teachers from the schools that volunteered for the intervention program indicated students with reading problems (filling the HKBCL instrument); (2) the program staff subsequently assessed the whole class in the TAF reading test (Rodrigues et al, 2022); (3) the students indicated by the teacher whose reading speed was below thirty words per minute, were assigned to the IG. A Cohen's k = .95 was obtained for raters' measurements.…”

The Use of Stocking-Lord and Haebara Methods in Horizontal Equating: A Case of Indonesian Madrasah Competence Assessment

“…By equating, scores from different years can be converted into parameter items on the same scale (M. Nisa & Retnawati, 2018), so the scores between test sets from different years are compared (M. Moghadamzadeh et al, 2011). The result reveals the relationship between the raw scores of two sets of tests from two parallel years so that the previous year's scores can be compared with the current year's (Rodrigues et al, 2022;Stoolmiller et al, 2013). Thus, the result captures the impact of the madrasa teachers learning interventions during the year.…”