Difficulty of curriculum-based measures in reading (CBM-R) passages on oral and silent reading assessments

Abstract

Curriculum based measures in reading (CBM-R) are used in schools to progress monitor elementary students’ growth in oral reading fluency. CBM-R uses alternate forms of passages to produce trend lines, which are subject to error associated with nonequivalence in passages. This study uses eye-tracking technology to analyze students’ oral and silent readings of the same passage to evaluate textual characteristics that influence students’ reading so that equivalence across passages might be improved. Participants were second grade average to superior-skill readers (n = 56). The passage included high, medium, and low frequency content words and function words as indicators of textual difficulty. Dependent variables included eye movements, oral word reading times, pre- and post-word pauses, and oral word errors. Results support prior research with word frequency and suggest using frequency to group words.