Combining quality and curriculum-based measurement: a suggested assessment protocol in writing

Curriculum-Based Measures in writing (CBM-W) assesses a variety of fluency-based components of writing. While support exists for the use of CBM measures in the area of writing, there is a need to conduct further validation studies to investigate the utility of these measures within elementary and secondary classrooms. Since only countable indices are used in CBM-W, this study explored the possibility of using an assessment that measured writing quality in conjunction with the CBM metric. To accomplish this, three pieces of data were used in this study. The CBM metrics of total words written, words spelled correctly, correct word sequences, percentage of words spelled correctly, and percentage of correct word sequences were scored from a timed writing passage that second grade students completed. Scores from the district writing assessment that classroom teachers rated using an analytic rubric that focused on quality were also analyzed. Last, a validated writing assessment, the TOWL-3, was used as the criterion measure. Using correlation and regression methods, results indicated that correct word sequences was the best predictor performance on the TOWL-3. Even though the teacher writing assessment correlated with the TOWL-3 at the significant level, adding it to the scores from the CBM-W measures did not significantly increase the validity.