Predicting Kindergarteners’ Response to Early Reading Intervention: An Examination of Progress-Monitoring Measures

Abstract

This study examined the predictive validity of combinations of progress-monitoring measures: (a) curriculum-embedded phonemic awareness and alphabetic/decoding measures, and (b) Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 2002) nonsense word fluency and phoneme segmentation fluency on reading outcomes of kindergarten students in a tier 2 intervention.

Results of multiple-regression analyses indicated that curriculum-embedded mastery checks and DIBELS measures each explained a significant amount of variance on the outcome measure. However, curriculum-embedded measures explained statistically significantly more variance at each time point supporting their utility in documenting progress of kindergarten students receiving intervention.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the Grant Number R324E06067, National Center for Special Education Research, from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education. The content and positions in this article do not necessarily represent those of the funding agency. We thank our testers and data-entry staff for their contributions and Kimberly Williams for her support in manuscript preparation. Last, we thank the school districts, administrators, teachers, interventionists, and children for their support and participation in this research.

The intervention used in this study was The Early Reading Intervention (Pearson/Scot Foresman, 2004). Because two authors of this manuscript are also coauthors of the intervention program (i.e., Simmons and Coyne), the following steps were implemented to ensure objectivity of findings.

1.	All data analyses were conducted by statisticians who had no financial interest with the Early Reading Intervention.
2.	An external consultant with no financial affiliation with the Early Reading Intervention program independently reviewed the manuscript to ensure that (a) data analyses were appropriate, accurate, and objective, (b) reported findings and discussion were accurate, and (c) interpretations were consistent with data analysis.