| The adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSSI, 2010) set higher expectations for students in many states than did previous state standards (Calkins, Ehrenworth, & Lehman, 2012). Reliable formative assessments for literacy skills, as outlined in the CCSS, must be developed to gather data that can, together with other information, provide an accurate picture of student progress. The purpose of this study was twofold: the first purpose was to determine the reliability of a formative measure of reading comprehension, the Content Area Reading Assessment (Leslie & Caldwell, 2015), and the second purpose was to determine participant ability to meet the CCSS as represented by the assessment. Participants in the study consisted of 211 sixth grade students who attended a suburban middle school. None of the participants were considered to have special needs. Each student read two of three passages within the same discipline. The CARA passages piloted in this study demonstrated various forms of reliability including: inter-rater reliability, passage order, question correlation with the overall score of the passage, and differences in difficulty among passages, disciplines and Standards. These results suggest that the sixth grade passages of the CARA provide a reliable formative assessment aligned to the CCSS. Students who participated in the pilot did not meet district proficiency for any Standards although they performed better when answering constructed response questions as opposed to writing summaries. Correlation of questions with their total passage scores revealed low alphas, which may have occurred because each passage had only ten questions (Tavakol & Dennick, 2011; Warner, 2013), or it may suggest that each question, aligned with a different Common Core State Standard, is representative of a different cognitive skill. Additionally, there were significant differences between the three disciplines; these findings support the idea of disciplinary literacy, that is, different disciplines are structured differently and require different skills for comprehension (Shanahan, C., Shanahan, T., & Misischia, C. (2011). |
