WHY MATRS?
- Assesses morphological awareness, a unique and significant predictor of literacy skills
- Helps educators determine what students know about morphemes and where they need more morphological awareness instruction
- Helps states meet literacy goals and mandates focused on students’ morphological awareness
- Developed by leading experts on morphological awareness through more than a decade of research
- Norm-referenced and standardized—4,060 students were included in the normative sample
- Easy and intuitive to use, with videos that demonstrate how to administer each task
HOW IT WORKS
MATRS consists of easy-to-implement subtests called tasks, administered by a reading specialist, speech-language pathologist, or other intervention specialist. There are a total of eight tasks in MATRS, and students complete four in each grade:
- Task 1: Segmenting (Grades 1 and 2)
- Task 2: Affix Identification (Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6)
- Task 3: Affix Meaning (Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4)
- Task 4: Suffix Choice (Grades 5 and 6)
- Task 5: Spelling Multi-Morphemic Words (Grades 4, 5, and 6)
- Task 6: Suffix Spelling (Grades 1, 2, and 3)
- Task 7: Spoken Relatives (Grades 1 and 2)
- Task 8: Written Relatives (Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6)
Following the clear directions in the Examiner Administration Booklet and demonstration videos, the examiner provides students with oral prompts and plays audio recordings to elicit and record responses. The test takes 35−45 minutes, and scoring is easy with the time-saving Excel scoring solution, which provides automated access to standard scores and percentile ranks. The MATRS kit also includes access to a full set of assessment materials for administering a follow-up test, so you can easily determine the effectiveness of interventions.
WHAT TO ORDER
The MATRS Kit contains everything you need: a detailed manual, Examiner Administration Booklet, and a pack of 10 Student Response Forms for each grade. You’ll also receive digital access to materials for follow-up testing, demonstration videos for each task, audio files, a Technical Report, and the MATRS Excel automated scoring solution.
Table of Contents:
Manual Contents
About the Authors
About the Downloads
Preface
Chapter 1: Overview of MATRS and Its Value
What is Morphological Awareness?
Background to MATRS
Overview of MATRS
Development of MATRS
Chapter 2: MATRS Tasks and Administration
Conceptual Model for MATRS
Preparing to Administer MATRS
Administering MATRS
MATRS Tasks
Chapter 3: MATRS Scoring, Interpretation, and Follow Up
Scoring MATRS
Considerations When Scoring MATRS
Additional Review of Students’ Responses
Providing MATRS Results to Others
Chapter 4: What’s Next: Case Studies/Student Profiles
Case 1: Nicole
Case 2: Connor
Case 3: Gage
Chapter 5: Research and Psychometric Data
Item Development Prior to Studies
Participants
Other Measures Administered
Procedures Across All Years of Item Calibration and Task Validation
Data Analysis and Results: Item Calibration Studies
Data Analysis and Results: Task Validation Studies
Results
References
Appendix A: Task Keys: Version A
Appendix B: Task Keys: Version B
Appendix C: Conversion of Raw Scores to Standard Scores and Percentiles
Index
About the Author :
Kenn Apel, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Formerly, he was Chair of that department. Dr. Apel has more than 35 years of experience conducting research in the areas of spoken and written language. His recent research focus has been on the linguistic factors that contribute to the development of reading and spelling, including morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge. Before retiring, he was the principal investigator of a three-year, $1.4M IES-sponsored grant (MATRS: Morphological Assessment for Reading and Spelling) to develop a morphological awareness assessment measure for students in 1st through 6th grades. Dr. Apel is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. He also received the Honors of that Association.
Victoria S. Henbest, Ph.D., is an ASHA certified speech-language pathologist and assistant professor in the Speech Pathology and Audiology Department at the University of South Alabama where she teaches undergraduate introductory courses on language and speech disorders as well as graduate-level school-age language and literacy and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) courses. Prior to earning her doctoral degree, Dr. Henbest worked for 5 years as a full-time clinician in a public-school early childhood setting with preschool-age children with speech and language needs, including children on the autism spectrum, those with intellectual disabilities, and medically complex children. Dr. Henbest's primary research interests include word-level reading and spelling and the relation between linguistic awareness skills, particularly morphological awareness, and literacy development. She has published and presented on these topics at the state, national, and international levels. Dr. Henbest is co-author of a textbook on child language disorders entitled Language Disorders in Children: Fundamental Concepts of Assessment and Intervention, Third Edition.
Yaacov Petscher, Ph.D., is Associate Director at the Florida Center for Reading Research, Tallahassee, and Deputy Director of the National Center on Improving Literacy. Dr. Petscher's research interests include the study of cross-sectional and longitudinal individual differences in literacy, psychometrics, reading assessment, and research design. He has co-authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, books, and technical reports, and his work has been recognized by awards from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, the International Literacy Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the International Society for Technology in Education. He presently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Learning Disabilities and Elementary School Journal and as an editorial board member for other educational journals.
