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Assignment 1

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Method Participants. Participants will be chosen from four elementary schools in the Midwest United States. The schools are a part of the same school district, and all schools are considered Title 1; meaning they are targeted by the state for schoolwide assistance for free or reduced lunch. We will request the school counselors at each building to send home written informed consent to parents or guardians of all mainstream 1st graders who are deemed academically at-risk by the school district. To meet the criteria to be considered academically at-risk, per the school district, the student must fall within one of these following categories: 1) were retained (meaning they did not advance from one grade level to the next, 2) the student …show more content…

The results from the five subtests make up the child’s Early Achievement Composite score. This score represents the child’s school-related achievement across the major areas of academic tasks (Hresko et al, 2000). The qualification level to administer the YCAT is Level B. The school counselors at the elementary schools and school psychological examiner will be allowed to administer the tests due to their qualification. The text completion time ranges from 25-45 minutes. High reliability has been established for the YCAT instrument. The internal consistency, or the degree to which the items correlate with one another, averaged above 0.85 (Blanco & Ray, 2011). The test-retest by the same examiner over a short-time interval was established at 0.98. Interrater reliability averaged at 0.98 (Hresko et al, 2000). The calculated Cronbach’s alpha for the study was 0.95 (Blanco & Ray, 2011). The YCAT demonstrated acceptable measures of validity when compared to other instruments, such as the Kaufman Survey of Early Academic and Language Skills, the Metropolitan Readiness Tests, and the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests (Hresko et al., 2000; Blanco & Ray, 2011). The reason this test was chosen for this study is because it does not require a specific wait time before being re-administered (2011). There is a possibility that a learning effect can happen for the participants that are taking the assessment; however, to control for this effect, the

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