An Investigation into the Relationship between Fourth Grade Degrees of Reading Power Achievement and the Fourth Grade New York State English Language Arts Assessment Achievement

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a statistically significant relationship in achievement between the traditional standardized fourth grade DRP reading test and the NYS English Language Arts Fourth Grade assessment. Academic standardized testing is becoming more performance based and is letting go of the traditional multiple choice assessment. New York State has adopted 28 learning standards for seven of the content areas. The language arts content area has four learning standards that have a great emphasis on higher level thinking and processing skills. To be able to assess the students properly, the state has developed the English Language Arts Assessment that requires students to create a more authentic written response by making more insightful connections between the reading passages and personal experience. The subjects were one hundred and thirty-one rural, heterogeneously-grouped fourth grade students. The ages of the students range from 8-10 years. The students' reading abilities range from advanced readers to students who receive Title One support. A correlation was used to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the NYS ELA and DRP test scores. All the findings indicate a strong positive correlation between the DRP reading test and the NYS ELA assessment. With 95% confidence, this study can expect that students who scored the highest on the ELA assessment should also score high on the DRP reading test, but may not have the same exact score. The same should also be true for the low and middle range scores. This expectation can be permitted due to the finding that essentially the skills measured on both tests are related.