Philippine E-Journals

Development and Validation of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) for Identifying Students with Reading Difficulties

Violeta C. Valladolid

 

Abstract:

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?).