Outlining how teachers can best support a literate community yet still meet the needs of individual readers, this book explains how to create a balanced literacy program for grades K-3 based on guided reading and supported by reading aloud, shared reading, interactive writing, and other approaches. The book also presents guidelines for observation…

A study determined whether the gap that separates bilingual reading disabled high school students from English speaking high school students could be bridged in a more efficient manner than the methodology presently being used in many schools throughout the New York City Public School System. Subjects were 33 bilingual students diagnosed as…

Using data from the 1991 IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) Reading Literacy Study, a study compared United States fourth- and ninth-grade students to students in 32 other countries; examined relationships between reading comprehension and aspects of family, schooling, and community; and investigated the…

A study examined the hypothesis that learning strategy coupled with efficacy-building teaching interactions would lead to greater strategic learning than learning strategy instruction alone. A reading comprehension strategy was taught to 184 students from 4 Los Angeles County (California) public and independent schools. Included were 65…

The San Diego City Schools system has set as one of its highest priorities the improvement of reading achievement throughout the district. This report was produced to profile, using a variety of indicators, the schools with the highest reading achievement. The study of reading achievement included two components, a teacher survey and reading…

The Performance Standards of the Oregon Certificate of Initial Mastery are described and discussed. Performance standards define how well students must perform on classroom and state assessments that lead to Oregon's Certificate of Initial Mastery. Students must complete classroom and state assessments that show what they know and can do in…

The Clark County (Nevada) School District introduced performance assessments into its assessment program for grades one through six as part of an effort to bring the assessment program in line with the revised curriculum. To study the effectiveness of these assessments, reading performance assessment results for grades three through five were…

This collection of descriptions of research at the Center for Research on Effective Schooling for Disadvantaged Students opens with the discussion of a synthesis of research on the effects of one-to-one tutoring programs used in first grade to prevent reading failure produced by Barbara Wasik and Robert Slavin. The synthesis reviews stringent…

A study investigated the effects of strategy instruction on the reading and writing abilities of sixth-grade middle-school students with delayed literacy. An experimental group of 10 sixth-grade, English-speaking inner-city students in the midwestern United States was matched on race, gender, and reading comprehension test scores with 10…

The Ohio State Literacy Survey, which assessed Ohio adults' literacy skills according to their performance on tasks reflecting the materials/demands encountered in daily life, was administered to a sample of 1,568 persons aged 16 years or older who were randomly selected from Ohio's approximately 8.3 million adults. Each participant received…

A study examined how students make specific inferences from prose passages. Subjects, 44 first- and second-year college students and 40 seventh-grade students, read 3 prose passages, each containing 6 inferential questions. The premise information for each question was expressed in one of six deductive inference forms: transitive, exclusive…

A study reviewed the effects of the whole language movement. Two forms of analysis were used: meta-analysis, and a simple "vote-counting" procedure. Quantitative studies that compared a whole language and a traditional (or basal reading) approach, published between 1988 and 1993, were selected for analysis. A total of 45 studies were…

Parents in affluent communities have been following the suggestion of research and delaying kindergarten entry of their young age-eligible children in order to increase the likelihood of the child's academic success. This study examined the correlation between the chronological age of a child entering kindergarten and his or her performance on…

A study compared the comprehension abilities of readers when reading narrative and expository discourse. It was designed to investigate how middle-level high-achieving and low-achieving readers comprehend the two discourse genres, testing the readers' comprehension of main ideas in the text under both conditions. Also examined was whether…

This report describes a program for using graphic organizers to enhance reading comprehension in the content areas. The targeted population consisted of middle school students in regular education classes at four different locations in a large metropolitan area. Graphic organizers will aid visually/spatially talented students as well as…