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IES Grant

Title: Assessment of Comprehension Skills in Older Struggling Readers
Center: NCER Year: 2005
Principal Investigator: Waters, Gloria Awardee: Boston University
Program: Literacy      [Program Details]
Award Period: 4 years Award Amount: $1,255,025
Type: Measurement Award Number: R305G050083
Description:

Purpose: In this project, the researchers aimed to develop a new comprehensive, computerized language assessment battery, called the Comprehensive Assessment of Reading and Listening (CARL) test. CARL was organized according to psycholinguistic principles and used to assess the comprehension problems of older readers (students in grades 7 to 10). Informing this measure was the observation that older struggling readers fail to read well for variety of reasons including difficulties at the word, sentence, or discourse level. At the time of this project, assessment tests were limited in their ability to identify those causes sufficiently to identify which intervention(s) may best support the student. By the end of this project, researchers aimed to have validated a reliable computerized assessment test that educators could use to identify which comprehension skills students may need to build and to assess whether students are becoming more accurate and more automatic with the various subcomponents through instruction.

Structured Abstract

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT DESCRIBES THE PROJECT AT THE TIME OF FUNDING

Setting: This project takes place in a large city in the Northeast.

Sample: A total of 680 students (80 in a pilot study and 600 in the main study) from grades 7, 8, 9, and 10 are participating. Participating students are balanced across grade levels in terms of socioeconomic status, race, and gender.

Research Design and Methods: In the first phase of the research effort, the research team is designing the tasks and stimulus materials to be used in the test. In the second phase, each participant is being tested on 16 subtests designed to evaluate language-processing abilities in the spoken, as well as the written, modality, in order to determine if comprehension problems are seen across language modalities. The four psycholinguistic levels being evaluated in both modalities are the single word level, the morphological level, the sentence level, and the discourse level. Participants represent a range of ability levels. Evaluation of the performance of each of the subtests should permit streamlining and shortening of the full battery.

Key Measures: Standardized measures of word-level decoding, vocabulary knowledge, and written and oral comprehension are being used to assess the construct validity of the new instrument.

Related IES Projects: Assessment of Comprehension in Older Struggling Readers (R305A100261)

Products and Publications

ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.


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