| New federal initiatives and reports are calling attention to the importance of conducting universal screenings in the initial years of students' schooling and providing early intervention to students whose performance is discrepant from their peers. The current identification system of teacher referral and special education evaluation using an Intra-Individual Achievement Discrepancy (IAD) model is not an effective means of early identification. Because a significant discrepancy is needed between student's ability (IQ) and achievement scores, the IAD model rarely is able to identify students early in their academic career when intervention would be most effective so instead students must "wait to fail." Identifying efficient and valid universal screening measures is thus a critical issue in education.; The primary purpose of the current study was to evaluate the validity of RR and R-CBM, two different universal screening measures, by examining each measures' relationship to students overall reading achievement as measured by the Woodcock Johnson-III reading subtests (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) after accounting for intelligence, age, and grade. In addition, the current study evaluated the differences between using challenging versus similar level R-CBM probes for universal screening. Finally, the present study extends previous research in the area of teacher ratings by comparing the precision of teacher judgments of accuracy versus fluency on both R-CBM and RR measures.; Overall results indicated that both R-CBM and RR significantly related to students' overall reading achievement as indicated by the WJ-III . While both R-CBM and RR accounted for a significant amount of variance in students' reading achievement, R-CBM was a stronger predictor of reading achievement. Comparisons of similar versus challenging R-CBM passages indicated no significant differences between passages' relationship with reading achievement. Finally, analyses of teacher ratings indicated that teachers may be able to recognize relative differences in level of performance across students, however, they tend to be less accurate at predicting specific levels of student oral reading fluency. |
