National efforts have been made to encourage technology integration in teacher preparation with expectations for frequent and successful applications with K-12 learners. While online learning has become pervasive in many fields in education, it has been somewhat slow to catch on in K-12 settings. The "Handbook of Research on Emerging…

This volume presents the findings of a large-scale study of individual differences in spoken (and heard) language development during the school years. The goal of the study was to investigate the degree to which language abilities at school entry were stable over time and influential in the child's overall success in important aspects of…

Theory about listening has been strongly affected by methodological orientations and institutional pressures. It would help if researchers spent more time on the objects of study rather than method. Traditional listening research has confused listening with general cognitive abilities, such as IQ. Studying listening as memory is a tempting…

"Policy Perspectives" presents visiting authors' own views and/or research on issues relevant to schools and communities nationwide. The idea that reading skill is largely a set of general-purpose maneuvers that can be applied to any and all texts is one of the main barriers to our children's overall low achievement in reading, argues…

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…

Investigates 9- to 11-year-old children's skill in written spelling of simple, monosyllabic nonwords. Nonword spelling was poorer for these children than for tested adults. Results suggest that word knowledge has direct (biasing) and indirect (general word spelling knowledge) effect on performance of the spelling task. (Author/BE)

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)

In comparing parent predictions of child performance with actual performance on six measures of emergent literacy, it was found that both fathers and mothers significantly overestimated their child's performance on over half of the measures. (PCB)

Proverb comprehension through reading was examined in 42 preadolescent students, 24 of whom were identified as "proficient readers," and 18 as "less proficient readers." Comprehension on both unfamiliar concrete and abstract proverbs was associated with reading proficiency, word knowledge, and analogical reasoning. (Contains references.)…

Comparison of the reading of rhymes by 20 children with cognitive disabilities (Down syndrome or autism) and 20 typically developing children (all matched for word recognition skills) found both groups were more similar than dissimilar in their rhyme-recognition accuracy, miscues, and grapheme-phoneme knowledge. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

Examines the differences between beginning and skilled readers in the units used to represent the meaning of text. Compares reading times and recall of 50 third- and fifth-graders. Stimulus sentences all had the same number of words but varied in the number of underlying propositions. (Author/CB)

This study compared 18 high-ability and average-ability secondary level deaf readers on 5 indicators of cognitive processes used during reading. Results indicated significant differences between groups on measures of fluency. However, intergroup similarities in processes suggest that these components do not determine reading superiority.…

This study examined relationships among lens color, visual grating, visual detection task performance, and peripheral retinal brightness thresholds among four adults and four children with reading disabilities and age-matched controls. Subjects with reading disabilities displayed significantly lower contrast sensitivity when tested with sine-wave…

Church records of adult reading abilities as evaluated yearly by Swedish priests were examined from the eighteenth century in families characterized by poor reading and good reading ability. Although descendents of poor readers tended to demonstrate lower reading scores, transmission patterns did not indicate a simple genetic mechanism. (Author/DB)

This study comparing 413 adults who had been abused and/or neglected as children with a control group (n=286) found significant differences between groups in IQ and reading ability, even when controlling for age, sex, race, and social class. Types of maltreatment were associated with differences in IQ and reading ability. (Author/DB)