27  Spanish Single Word Recognition (ROAR-Palabra) Concurrent Validity

ROAR-Palabra is designed to measure the latent construct of single word reading. Analogous to the concurrent validity analyses for ROAR-Word, we first establish that the silent, lexical decision task in ROAR-Palabra taps into the same latent construct by comparing ROAR-Palabra scores to a variety of other standardized measures of single word reading (see Section 24.1).

Figure 27.1 shows the correlation between ROAR-Palabra raw scores (\(\theta\)) and a composite of Woodcock Muños (WM) Letter-Word Identification (real word reading) and Word Attack (pseudoword reading) raw scores. The correlation between ROAR-Palabra and WM is not as strong as the correlation between ROAR-Word and WJ (Figure 24.1; Figure 24.2; Figure 24.4) but this likely has to do with ceiling and floor effects in the sample: in transparent orthographies like spanish there is substantial less variation in single word reading skills. Figure 27.2 and Figure 27.3 show correlations for WM subtests separately.

27.1 Convergent validity with oral measures of single word reading

27.1.1 Woodock Muñoz

Table 27.1

Figure 27.1: Correlations between ROAR-Palabra raw scores (theta) and Woodcock-Muñoz Basic Reading Skills raw scores.

Figure 27.2: Correlations between ROAR-Palabra raw scores and Woodcock-Muñoz Letter-word Identification raw scores.

Figure 27.3: Correlations between ROAR-Palabra Raw Scores and Woodcock-Muñoz Word Attack raw scores.

27.1.2 Growth Over Time

Another source of validation is examining growth trajectories of ROAR-Palabra scores over time. Figure 27.4 shows how ROAR-Palabra score steadily increase in each grade and Figure 27.5 shows grade level norms for ROAR-Palabra.

Figure 27.4: ROAR-Palabra ability estimates (theta) by grade

Figure 27.5: ROAR-Palabra norms by grade