Abstract:

In the United States, progress monitoring is an essential component for students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Progress monitoring, or consistent assessments in areas of student need, is used to determine if a student is making progress toward his educational goals. “Research has demonstrated that when teachers use student progress monitoring, students learn more, teacher decision making improves, and students become more aware of their own performance” (Safer & Fleischman, 2005). It is difficult to accurately monitor reading comprehension in adolescents due to time constraints. vocabulary and comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000). Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal for reading and instruments for evaluating reading comprehension need to improve (Snow, 2002). Often oral reading fluency (ORF) is used as a progress monitoring tool for adolescents. This indirect measure fails to provide detailed information about how a student is able to analyze and synthesize information from texts, nor what kinds of simple recall and critical questions he or she is able to consistently answer correctly. An Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) is used as a benchmark and given a few times per year. While an IRI can provide important information on student comprehension, it is given individually and can take up to 45 minutes per student to administer. A research team has developed an electronic assessment that can be given to an entire classroom of students at one time in approximately seven to ten minutes. The assessment can be individualized to student level and gives immediate feedback to the teacher on student's progress. The ACE (Adolescent Comprehension Evaluation) is an electronic application for eleven to fourteen year old students. There are 10 informational and 10 narrative texts for each year. Each passage contains 10 to 12 comprehension questions based on standards for that age level. This presentation will explain the patent pending ACE, how it was used in four schools with eighth grade students. The validation process of the assessment will also be discussed.

Keywords:

Reading comprehension, technology.