Reaching an Understanding

Reaching an Understanding: Innovations in How We View Reading Assessment builds upon the editors previous book Measuring Up: Advances in How We Assess Reading Ability by representing some early attempts to apply theory to help guide the development of new assessments and measurement models. Reaching an Understanding is divided into two sections: ＂assessment, learning, and instruction: connecting text, task, and reader/ learner＂ and ＂how to build for the future＂. These sections identify ways to assess students reading comprehension through multiple text sources, purpose readings, and assessment while a student is reading in order to determine deficits. In light of federal legislation towards common core standards and assessments, as well as significant national investments in reading and literacy education, it is a critical and opportune time to bring together the research and measurement community to address fundamental issues of measuring reading comprehension, in theory and in practice.

John Sabatini is a Senior Research Scientist in the Research & Development Division at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. His research interests and expertise are in reading literacy development and disabilities, assessment, cognitive psychology, and educational technology. He is the principal investigator of a Department of Education funded grant to develop pre-K -12 comprehension assessments. Tenaha O’Reilly is currently a Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include a variety of topics relating to reading comprehension, metacognition, background knowledge and summative assessment. Elizabeth R. Albro, Ph.D, is currently Acting Commissioner of the National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, at the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Albro received her doctorate in Psychology from the University of Chicago, and served on the Child Development and Education faculty at Whittier College, and on the Psychology faculty at Wheaton College, Norton MA. She has spent the past decade overseeing research programs in the areas of reading and writing and cognitive science at the National Center for Education Research.