Do intervention-embedded assessment procedures successfully measure student growth in reading?

Effective intervention delivery requires ongoing assessment to determine whether students are learning at the desired rate. Intervention programs with embedded assessment procedures (i.e., assessment that occurs naturally during the process of delivering intervention) can potentially enhance instructional decisions. However, there is almost no psychometric research on this type of assessment procedure. This study was designed to examine the psychometric characteristics of three types of progress measures that are embedded within a commonly used reading intervention program. Results indicated that generalized gains across different oral reading fluency passages predict concurrent gains on common and comprehensive tests of reading fluency, and that immediate instructional gains measured during instruction were significantly different from zero and thus sensitive to intervention effects. Overall findings suggest that at least some embedded assessment procedures demonstrate predictive validity and that these types of procedures have the potential to assist educators with data-driven instructional decisions about students' responsiveness to intervention.