Presenters: Mandy Durland
Authors: Anna Pomares, Kaeun Choo, Mandy Durland, Lindsey Roberts, Kristi Jones
Faculty Advisor: Douglas Petersen
Institution: Brigham Young University
It is important to frequently assess oral language and reading comprehension so that educators can identify struggling students. Current approaches to monitoring oral language and reading comprehension have several limitations. First, very few school districts systematically monitor oral language. Second, most reading comprehension assessments do not have equivalent parallel forms. Third, reading comprehension tools often do not reflect the complex, academic language expected in state standards. Finally, these assessments often measure reading comprehension in a manner that lacks validity (Petersen & Richardson, 2018). We have been developing such a tool which requires a student to read and then retell a hybrid narrative and expository passage that models complex, academic language, story grammar, and text structure. By using a retell procedure, we can obtain information on receptive and expressive academic language (Reese et al., 2009). This progress monitoring tool is an extension of the preschool-third grade Narrative Language Measures (NLM) subtest of the CUBED assessment (CUBED; Petersen & Spencer, 2016), which has excellent validity and reliability. The purpose of this study was to develop a narrative and expository reading comprehension progress monitoring tool with alternate forms for fourth grade and above, and to examine whether each alternate form yields parallel data across several linguistic measures. We created and administered 10 alternate forms to 8 middle school students. Students read and then retold each passage and answered factual and inferential questions. Results indicated that retell scores from the Advanced NLM alternate forms were significantly and strongly correlated with each other. While there was a significant difference between alternate forms for expository and vocabulary, the retell and inferencing scores were not significantly different from each other. This evidence of parallel form reliability suggest that the passages could be used interchangeably for progress monitoring for older students.