Background: Linguistic comprehension and narrative skills encapsulate a complex array of grammatical and semantic skills that underpin complex reading comprehension processes. However, most research in this area has focused on children with reading difficulties and not on typically developing children. Also the research has mostly focused on…

Background: There is evidence that children who are taught to read later in childhood (age 6-7) make faster progress in early literacy than those who are taught at a younger age (4-5 years), as is current practice in the UK. Aims: Steiner-educated children begin learning how to read at age 7, and have better reading-related skills at the onset of…

Background: The strategies students adopt in their study are influenced by a number of social-cognitive factors and impact upon their academic performance. Aims: The present study examined the interrelationships between motivation orientation (intrinsic and extrinsic), self-efficacy (in reading academic texts and essay writing), and approaches to…

Background: A strong link between phonological awareness (PA) and literacy exists, but the origins of this link are difficult to investigate, since PA skills are hard to test in young, pre-literate children, and many studies neither include such children nor report children's initial literacy levels. Aims: To examine PA and literacy in children…

Background: Remarkably few studies have investigated the nature and origin of learning difficulties in children with cerebral palsy (CP). Aims: To investigate math achievement in terms of word-problem solving ability in children with CP and controls. Because of the potential importance of reading for word-problem solving, we investigated reading…

Background: Poor comprehenders are children who show significant deficits in their reading comprehension performance, despite average, or above-average word reading ability. To date, there have been no in-depth studies of the mathematical performance profiles of such children. Aims: This study aimed to explore the mathematical profiles of poor…

Background: The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA; Neale, 1997) is a widely used assessment of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy. Spooner, Baddeley, and Gathercole (2004) questioned the suitability of the NARA for identifying children with specific reading comprehension deficits. Aims and methods: An evaluation of the NARA…

Pupils at different reading ages (RA) read narrative texts with or without illustrations. Good readers at RA7 used illustrations to identify textual messages, process information, and comprehend texts. For poor readers, illustrations were of limited help or actually increased errors. Good readers at RA9 were least affected by the illustrations.…

Results of analysis of correlations collected by Cookson, following Eysenck and Cookson's study of personality and ability in young people, confirm the finding from previous Cattellian test data that the more intelligent children decline in relative extraversion scores and cast doubt on Eysenck's suggestion that introverts gradually show higher…

Background: The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA) (Neale, 1997) is widely used in education and research. It provides measures of reading accuracy (decoding) and comprehension, which are frequently interpreted separately. Aims: Three studies were conducted to investigate the degree to which the NARA measures could be separated. Samples:…

Background: In this study, 2 main hypotheses have been put forward to explain the variation in childhood intelligence or school performance by season of birth. In the first hypothesis, it is suggested that it is due to school policy concerning school entry, whereas the second suggests that a seasonally patterned exposure such as temperature,…

The reading process incorporates three factors: images registered in visual sensory memory, semantic analysis in short-term memory, and long-term memory storage. The focus here is on the contribution of sensory memory to reading performance. (Author/RK)

Use of contextual information in reading was examined by subjecting pupils to a cloze task (inserting missing words in texts) and an error-detection task (recognizing graphemic, syntactic, or semantic errors in texts). Children in higher grades and good readers (versus poor readers) demonstrated greater use of graphemic, syntactic, and semantic…

The reading and mathematics performance of five groups of primary school age children (four of which were receiving special education in various forms) were compared longitudinally using a national representative sample. There was little difference in the reading progress of ESN(M) children in ordinary and special schools although the latter made…

Background: It is widely recognized that effective interventions for poor reading involve training in phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge, linked in the context of reading books. From the applied perspective, it is important to gather data on the effectiveness of different forms of implementation of literacy support within this framework.…