CUBED-3 Validity and Reliability:
Assessments you can trust

 

There is considerable evidence to support the validity and reliability of the CUBED-3 especially with culturally and linguistically diverse students. The CUBED-3 can be used as a universal screener and a progress monitoring measure of phonemic awareness, decoding, reading fluency, and language and reading comprehension. It can help educators accurately identify diverse students who need supplemental and intensive intervention, and can play a vital role in multi-tiered system of supports for decoding and comprehension. 

Estimates of reliability and evidences of validity are extremely important to consider when deciding whether a test is appropriate for an examiner’s needs. If a test isn’t reliable, then the examiner cannot have confidence that the results of the test are an accurate estimate of a student’s abilities. Evidence of validity provides the examiner with information on how well the test measures what it is supposed to measure, and helps the examiner know how well the test will likely satisfy his or her purpose for administering the test. An examiner should always evaluate the information about a test’s validity while keeping in mind his or her purpose for administering the test, and, most importantly, the examiner’s purpose for using the test should align with the test’s intended purpose.

Reliability 

Inter-Rater Reliability.For inter-rater reliability, two independent examiners should assign similar scores to the same student response. We focused considerable resources on collecting inter-rater reliability of the CUBED-3 subtests. Inter-rater reliability of real-time scoring of the NLM subtests was analyzed with over 60 independent examiners. Results of this analysis, reported in the reliability section of the CUBED-3 Examiner’s Manual, indicated that the NLM can be scored with excellent reliability.

Validity 

Concurrent Validity.

Evidence of validity can be derived by examining the relationship between the CUBED-3 and the results of other assessments administered at approximately the same time. This examination is designed to demonstrate the extent that the CUBED-3 results are comparable to results from previously validated instruments that measure similar constructs. Six research studies with 1,146 preschool through 3rd grade students examined evidence of concurrent validity comparing the CUBED-3 NLM Listening Retell highest score to scores from several criterion measures of language. We also compared CUBED-3 composite scores to the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment. The majority of these comparisons, presented in correlation coefficients, offer strong evidence of concurrent, criterion-related validity for the CUBED-3.

Sensitivity and Specificity
We examined the predictive validity of the CUBED-3. Sensitivity in this case represents the extent to which the CUBED-3 accurately identified students who were at risk, and specificity refers to the extent to which the CUBED-3 accurately identified students who were not at risk.