Monitoring Children with Reading Disabilities' Response to Phonics Intervention: Are There Differences between Intervention Aligned and General Skill Progress Monitoring Assessments?

This study investigated whether 2 different progress monitoring assessments differentially predicted growth in reading skills associated with systematic phonics instruction. Oral reading fluency (ORE) was compared with an intervention aligned word list (IAWL) as predictors of growth in untimed and timed decoding and word identification and text reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. Results from 40 children with reading disabilities, Grades 2-5, indicated that the IAWL accounted for unique variance in change on measures of decoding and word identification, whereas the ORF measure accounted for unique variance on passable reading fluency gains. Evaluation of the IAWL psychometric properties revealed adequate reliability and construct validity; however, additional analysis indicated that the hierarchical coding scheme used to determine each word's rank difficulty ordering was not as effective. (Contains 3 figures and 4 tables.)