Examining Diagnostic Utility of CELF-5 Sentence Comprehension Test

In our partnership with urban schools serving large populations of students from lower socioeconomic and culturally diverse backgrounds, we have provided research-based interventions for improving the reading skills of at-risk readers in first and second grade. Our research augments the school’s response-to-intervention (RTI) while simultaneously investigating the efficacy of our assessments and interventions. Because the school we work with tends to have insufficient personnel and resources to serve all who need RTI, it is essential that our screening measures can accurately identify children who may need extra intervention. Last year we were asked to assess kindergarteners and provide an intervention to those identified as at-risk for developing reading problems. Adapting our project to meet the needs of the school, we chose the Sentence Comprehension subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-5) as a measure of language comprehension to screen for potential reading comprehension problems