Educators have used narrative fiction to expand knowledge and facilitate awareness about underrepresented populations, including those with disabilities. This study is a content analysis of nine award-winning young-adult narrative fiction books with characters depicting individuals with ASD. The analysis yielded a total of 285 symptoms that were…

Librarians often wish to know whether readers in a particular discipline favor e-books or print books. Because print circulation and e-book usage statistics are not directly comparable, it can be hard to determine the relative interest of readers in the two types of books. This study demonstrates a two-step method by which librarians can assess…

Research Findings: This study examines the association between preschool classroom activity and the quality of the language spoken by teachers and children. Eighteen classrooms serving low-income children between the ages of 3 and 4 in Santiago de Chile were audio-recorded during one morning shift. Recordings were transcribed and segmented into…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

This study described the commenting practices of Head Start teachers, and the relationship of comments to the expressive and receptive vocabulary growth of children with below-the-mean language ability across one year of preschool. Participants included 52 Head Start teachers, and 489 children (247 early intervention candidates and 242 Head Start…

The purpose of this research was to investigate pupil background characteristics and academic performance in senior secondary schools in Kitwe district with a view of recommending on how to improve pupils' performance. The study was conducted in Kitwe district because in the past years pupils' performance in senior secondary schools has been…

The purpose of the current study was to examine how maternal reading strategies and book type would impact on toddlers' responsiveness as they became familiar with three books. Eleven mothers and their 2- to 3-year-olds were recorded reading the same set of three different books (i.e. word book, narrative book and no narrative book) on four…

Models of irregular word reading that take into account both child- and word-level predictors have not been evaluated in typically developing children and children with reading difficulty (RD). The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in irregular word reading ability among 5th grade children (N = 170), oversampled for…

Readers readily identify with characters in literature; therefore, educators must be acutely aware of the overt and underlying messages conveyed in Newbery Medal books. In this quantitative content analysis with a qualitative component, the researchers employed nonparametric measurements to examine Newbery Medal books from the 1920s to the 2000s…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of personalized books on parents' and children's engagement during shared book reading. Seven native English parents and their children aged between 12 and 33 months were observed at home when sharing a book made specifically for the child (i.e. a personalized book), a comparable book with no…

This research reports a two-phase descriptive study of young children's engagement with ebooks conducted in Head Start classrooms. Phase 1 focused on the development of a typology as an analytic framework for observing engagement with ebooks in different formats (shared book; independent book browsing) and across devices (stationary touch screen;…