Recent legislation such as No Child Left Behind and the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA) increasingly pressure teachers and schools to be accountable for instructional time in the form of improved test scores. As a result, students are given an increasing variety of assessments in a given school year in an attempt to measure academic growth over time. These assessments frequently occur in the form of curriculum-based measures (CBM) of oral reading fluency, informal reading inventories (IRIs), computer adaptive tests (CATs) of reading, and annual high stakes assessments of reading ability. While a review of the literature reveals a well-established relationship between CBMs, IRIs, and high stakes assessments, less empirical evidence exists that illustrates the relationship between and technical adequacy of CBMs, IRIs, and CATs of reading ability. Specifically, the current study examined the concurrent and predictive validity of CBMs and IRIs on computer adaptive assessments in students in second through fifth grade. Further, given the increasing diversity of student populations, the current study sought to examine the extent to which one's status as an English Learner or student with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) moderates the relationships between oral reading fluency and CATs and IRIs and CATs.

Publisher-recommended cut scores were subsequently applied to all subsamples, and estimates of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive power (PPP), negative predictive power (NPP), and overall correct classification (OCC) were computed. Of the three statistical methods, only two (DA and ROC curve analysis) produced cut scores that maintained adequate levels of sensitivity (less than .70) across cohorts, in predicting FCAT and SAT-10 performance. These cut scores consistently had higher levels of sensitivity than the publisher-recommended and LR cut scores; however, they had lower levels of specificity and OCC. Across all sets of cut scores, levels of PPP were relatively low, while levels of NPP were higher. Overall, these results suggest that locally-developed cut scores may be a promising alternative to publisher-recommended cut scores in identifying students who are at risk for long-term reading problems.