Previous research has demonstrated correlation between letter-naming and letter-writing fluency, and a relationship between letter-naming fluency and successful reading development. Awareness of critical features of letters has received less attention as a part of handwriting development, but it is theorized to also play a role in letter-writing…

Strong oral reading fluency skills are an important indication of good reading. In addition, reading engagement is often correlated with reading success. Unfortunately, students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle to read fluently and engage with text. Incorporating graphic novels as part of a comprehensive reading program may help…

Reading rate, usually measured in words per minute, is a common operationalization of reading fluency in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. However, the impact of word length is often not addressed. This paper presents two studies showing how the number of characters in a text influences L2 reading time, independent of word counts, within…

Associations between home literacy environment and children's reading ability are often assumed to reflect a direct influence. However, heritability could account for the association between parent and child literacy-related measures. We used data from 101 mother/father/child triads to consider the extent to which associations between home…

In this article, we present results of a survey designed to understand teachers' (n = 77) and students' (n = 875) perceptions of purported negative consequences of using one-minute oral reading fluency (ORF) measures such as the "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills" (DIBELS) ORF assessment and the "aimsweb Reading…

Two studies explored the technical adequacy of various measures of advanced phonics skills. In Study 1, the advanced phonics measures consisted of pseudowords, real words, or a combination of both. Participants included 39 students in the third grade. Test-retest correlations for all measures were above 0.8 and interrater reliability was high.…

The primary goal of this research is to better understand my students' reading orientations--what they believe it means to be a successful reader. I also seek to identify the relationship between those beliefs and my teaching. The data come primarily from six focal students in my second-grade classroom in an urban public charter elementary school…

Due to the controversial nature of previous research it is unclear whether music has positive or negative effect on cognition. Previous studies tested different styles and tempos of music, and have found that songs with faster beats distract learning. There have been numerous studies and each study refutes another study. Research has been done on…

The present study reports the basic characteristics of a game-like application entitled "Playing with Words-PwW". PwW is a single-user application where a word must be guessed given an anagram of that word. Anagrams are presented from a predefined word list and users can repeatedly try to guess the word, from which the anagram is…