Invented spellings refer to incorrect attempts to spell words while writing, which are important indicators of children's development of phonemic awareness. Making Words is a popular activity to teach phonics and spelling, in which students manipulate letters in sequence to construct target words and then sort them into rhyming patterns. This…

Screening and monitoring student reading progress can be costly and time consuming. Assessment embedded within the context of online instructional programs can capture ongoing student performance data while limiting testing time outside of instruction. This paper presents two studies that examined the validity of using performance measures from a…

This study explores the efficacy of the Waterford Early Reading program (ERP) for teaching kindergarten and first grade students' early reading concepts. Students attended 3 elementary schools in Alabama. The treatment group used the software program whereas the control group did not use the software. Analyses revealed a significant treatment…

The IRT (Item Response Theory) has been studied and applied in computer-based test for decades. However, almost of all these existing studies evaluated focus merely on test questions with text-based (or static text/graphic) type of presentation form illustrated exclusively. In this paper, we present our study on test questions using both…

Multimedia is increasingly being used in computer-based learning, and the general indication is that this trend will persist for a while to come. One rationale for this trend the assumption that multimedia has properties that can aid learning, particularly the learning of abstract subjects. One area which has long been seen as a target for the use…