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Abstract
There is a great need for educators to focus on the development of early literacy skills as national assessment data indicate that less than half the children who enter into the fourth grade read proficiently (Center for Education Statistics, 2005). As a result of these statistics, federal mandates aim to close the achievement gap. In order to achieve this goal, educators need valid instruments to assess early literacy skills. The current research examined two sources of validity for the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (Good & Kaminski, 1996) assessment. Concurrent evidence of validity was examined for the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (Good & Kaminski, 1996) with the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999). The validity evidence included concurrent and factor analytic measures. The convergent and divergent relationship between the two literacy measures investigated supports the hypothesis that they are measuring similar latent constructs. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to investigate the dimensionality of the latent constructs (i.e. phonemic and orthographic awareness). The results indicated a strong relationship between measures of phonemic and orthographic awareness, and a weak relationship between phonemic and orthographic awareness with rapid naming tasks.