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This article describes key findings from contemporary research on screening for early primary grade students in the area of mathematics. Existing studies were used to illustrate the constructs most worth measuring and the diverse strategies that researchers used to study potential measures. The authors discussed the strengths and weaknesses of assessing a few key proficiencies (as is often done in early reading) versus a more full-scale battery, and described the importance of going beyond merely reporting predictive validity correlation coefficients to examining the classification accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of screening measures. [This article was published in "Exceptional Children," (EJ970689).]

Replication studies are extremely rare in education. This randomized controlled trial (RCT) is a scale-up replication of Fuchs et al., which in a sample of 139 found a statistically significant positive impact for Number Rockets, a small-group intervention for at-risk first graders that focused on building understanding of number operations. The study was relatively small scale (one site) and highly controlled. This replication was implemented at a much larger scale--in 76 schools in four urban districts; 994 at-risk students participated. Intervention students participated in approximately 30 hours of small-group work in addition to classroom instruction; control students received typical instruction and whatever assistance the teacher would normally provide. Intervention students showed significantly superior performance on a broad measure of mathematics proficiency.

This article describes key findings from contemporary research on screening for early primary grade students in the area of mathematics. Existing studies were used to illustrate the constructs most worth measuring and the diverse strategies that researchers used to study potential measures. The authors discussed the strengths and weaknesses of assessing a few key proficiencies (as is often done in early reading) versus a more full-scale battery, and described the importance of going beyond merely reporting predictive validity correlation coefficients to examining the classification accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of screening measures. (Contains 3 tables.)

When attempting to determine if an intervention has a causal impact, the "gold standard" of program evaluation is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). In education studies random assignment is rarely feasible at the student level, making RCTs harder to conduct. School-level assignment is more common but this often requires considerable resources compared to designs where classrooms can be assigned within a school. This article describes the costs and benefits of testing the effects of a classroom based instructional intervention using the multi-site cluster RCT. Topics covered include a discussion of various design options, statistical power, contamination, prior evidence, generalizability of results, ease of recruitment and need for data collection. The purpose of the article is to inform practice by providing program evaluators with an in-depth look at various RCT design options that were considered when searching for a way to efficiently evaluate a school-based intervention. (Contains 1 table and 4 footnotes.)

Presents information on EQUIPERCENT, a SAS program for calculating ≡ scores using the equipercentile method. Use of equipercentile equating; Features and application of the computer program; Availability of EQUIPERCENT.