Jehna A. Hart

Date of Graduation

Spring 2010

Degree

Master of Science in Communication Sciences and Disorders

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Committee Chair

Julie J. Masterson

Abstract

The No Child Left behind Act (Moore-Brown & Montgomery, 2005) requires that all public schools have accountability measures that document annual student progress. Determinations of progress are only as good as the measures used, thus it is important to have measures that are efficient and can optimally measure and document change. Conventional literacy measures assess reading through tests of real word reading, nonsense word reading, reading comprehension and fluency. A orrect/incorrect system, with no specific measure of developmental progress is usually used to evaluate children's spelling. In this study, I examined the usefulness of the Developmental Reading Fluency Test (DRFT) (Maerlander, 2009), an experimental measure of reading fluency, and the Spelling Sensitivity Scoring (SSS) system (Masterson & Apel, 2007), an experimental metric of spelling accuracy, for documenting literacy development in elementary Grades, 2, 3 and 4. Results indicated statistically significant changes within and across grades for reading fluency measures, indicating concurrent validity between the DRFT and the Reading Fluency subtest of the Woodcock Johnson Diagnostic Reading Battery III (WJIII). The experimental measure of spelling documented developmental changes, however, it was no more sensitive than the traditional percent correct method. Correlations among all measures used to represent reading fluency and spelling were statistically significant.

Keywords

reading, spelling, reading fluency, Developmental Reading Fluency Test, Woodcock Johnson III Diagnostic Reading Battery, elementary grades, response to intervention

Subject Categories

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Copyright

© Jehna A. Hart

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