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Development and Validation of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) for Identifying Students with Reading Difficulties
Authors: Violeta C. Valladolid
Number of views: 638
The role of classroom teachers in the early detection of learning difficulty/disability in school
children cannot be ignored. When it comes to young children's literacy learning, there is
substantial consensus that the teacher is the primary assessment agent (Johnston & Rogers,
2002). But classroom teachers also have a lot of responsibilities in school. As such, they need
an assessment and identification approach that they can easily employ. Progress monitoring is
one of the feasible and practicable methods in identifying students at-risk. Progress monitoring
is a set of assessment procedures for determining the extent to which students are benefiting
from classroom instruction and for monitoring effectiveness of curriculum (Johnson, Mellard,
Fuchs, & McKnight, 2006). It makes use of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM), which
has been demonstrated by research to effectively gather student performance data to support a
wide range of educational decisions, such as screening to identify students with learning
disability, evaluating referral interventions, and determining eligibility for and placement in
remedial and special education programs (Deno, 2003). This study aimed to develop and
validate a set of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) tools to identify students at-risk of
reading difficulty in public schools. This study is relevant since the Philippine public school
system is in dire need for an alternative method to identify and help students who are at-risk of
reading difficulty that is not only valid and relevant, but also cost-effective, teacher-driven, and
easily-implemented. The development and validation of CBMs for this study followed the
following stages: (1) definition of criterion and performance standards (i.e., “what to
measure?”), (2) development of CBM-ORF passages (i.e., “how to measure?”), and (3)
assessment of the reliability and validity of the CBM (i.e., how technically adequate are the
measures?)