As reading is vital to success in life and opens the door to nearly all other learning opportunities, it is essential that educators understand why students with learning how to read. Therefore, it is key for both professionals and researchers to establish their own approaches to assist those with reading difficulties. "Developing Effective…

The implementation of effective instructional materials, such as a core reading program, by a qualified teacher is an important part of improving students' reading achievement. But selecting those instructional materials can be time-consuming. Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast created this rubric for evaluating reading/language arts…

Comprehension tests are often used interchangeably, suggesting an implicit assumption that they are all measuring the same thing. We examine the validity of this assumption by comparing some of the most popular reading comprehension measures used in research and clinical practice in the United States: the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT), the two…

Compared to 92 low-achieving and high-achieving students, 46 intermediate grade learning-disabled students wrote compositions, wrote summaries, and produced comprehension recalls that were less organized and contained fewer ideas. Interviews indicated that learning-disabled students possessed less knowledge about processes related to…

Suggests using analogies to aid in reading instruction. (MKM)

Compares spontaneous and instructed use of lexical, external consistency, and internal consistency standards of evaluation as a function of age, reading proficiency, and type of standard. A total of 108 elementary school students divided evenly between fourth and sixth grades identified problems embedded within passages of expository text. (RH)

This article reviews literature supporting the relationship of emotional factors and success in reading and writing activities, outlines physical and language behaviors that indicate emotional involvement with success or lack of success in comprehension, and presents strategies that help children understand what they need to do to read and write…

The roles that language plays in science learning, the ways that science can be used to develop children's language, and how increased knowledge of language goes hand in hand with the development of scientific ideas provide the key focus for this book. The introduction provides an overview by focusing on what we mean by learning science, what we…

Background knowledge is a critical relationship in reading comprehension. Includes a discussion on the classroom application of background knowledge in reading instruction. (MD)

Suggests using readability formulas, a skills inventory, an introspective report, and diagnostic approaches based on models of comprehension as informal evaluations of students' content reading ability. (MKM)

Twelve children, aged 9-19, with severe/profound hearing impairments were instructed to read sentences with similes, metaphors, idioms, and proverbs, and to explain them. Subjects' performance differed significantly from the performance of a control group. Subjects' performance was dependent upon reading level and was variable across chronological…

The study found no significant difference between 50 deaf and 50 hearing readers' sensitivity to contextual build-up as evaluated in a cumulative cloze exercise, using readers at the eighth-, tenth-, and twelfth- grade levels. Differences in the number of deaf and hearing readers' responses were found at the fourth- and sixth-grade levels.…

Demonstrates practical classroom techniques for improving comprehension of social studies materials. Based upon the Three Levels Construct developed by Harold Herber, the article presents exercises relating to reading selections appropriate to each level of reading comprehension. (Author/DB)

States that comprehension of expository text and the ability to summarize are factors in students' success with such material. Describes a model that induces students to use existing schemata to create new and necessary expectations while providing a technique for explicitly teaching the components of effective summaries. (JK)

A balanced approach to reading instruction favors cultivating reading as a strategic activity that requires intentionality, interest, and motivation on the part of the learner. Includes references. (MD)