DEVELOPMENTAL, GENDER, AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN SCORING CURRICULUM-BASED MEASUREMENT WRITING PROBES

The present study focused on CBM written language procedures by conducting an investigation of the developmental, gender, and practical considerations surrounding three categories of CBM written language scoring indices: production-dependent, production-independent, and accurate-production. Students in first- through eighth-grade generated a three-minute writing sample in the fall and spring of the school year using standard CBM procedures. The writing samples were scored using all three types of scoring indices to assess the trends in scoring indices for students of varying ages and gender and of the time required to score writing samples using various scoring indices. With only one exception, older students outperformed younger students on all of the scoring indices. Although at the middle school level students ’ levels of writing fluency and writing accuracy were not closely associated, at the younger grade levels the CBM indices were significantly related. With regard to gender differences, girls outperformed boys on measures of writing fluency at all grade levels. The average scoring time per writing sample ranged from 112 _ to 212 _ minutes (depending on grade level). © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Curriculum-based measurement (CBM), or standardized, short-duration fluency measures of academic skills (Shinn, 1995) are gaining prominence in the schools for use within a problem