Teacher perceptions about students' academic abilities are important for several reasons (e.g., instructional decision making, special education entitlement decisions). Not surprisingly, researchers have investigated the accuracy of teachers' decisions. Although some data reveal that teachers are relatively good judges of academic performance,…

Stroop interference is often taken as evidence for reading automaticity even though young and poor readers, who presumably lack reading automaticity, present strong interference. Here the relationship between reading skills and Stroop interference was studied in a 7th-grade sample. Greater interference was observed in children diagnosed with…

Once upon a time, Americans identified illiteracy among high school graduates as a national crisis. The solution, almost everyone agreed, was to teach every child to read by the end of third grade. If students could read well by then, the reasoning went, they would read even better in all the grades that followed. However, the 2005 results of the…

Students with learning disabilities face real reading challenges. Research into the reading performance of culturally diverse students indicates improved reading performance for culturally diverse students when text matches students' cultural perspective. This quasiexperimental research investigates whether Caucasian and African American students…

Contains practical suggestions for teaching literature to students with a wide range of abilities and interests. (RB)

The study investigated narrative schemata (abstract, prototypical memory frameworks containing the typical plot organizations for a story) with 17 hearing and 40 hearing impaired college students (poor and good readers). Subjects were asked to order statements into story order for three stories. Analysis of the stories in their original and edited…

Third grade children classified as good or poor readers were exposed to a sequential memory task under familiar and novel conditions. Recall scores were higher for good than for poor readers for novel but not familiar material. Results confirm the position that poor readers hav a deficit in applying verbal labels to certain physical stimuli. (ST)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether subjective organizational ability and the organization of materials influence reading comprehension for one good and two groups of poor readers. The subjects were 200 freshmen classified as good readers with (average or above average reading comprehension), difference poor readers (with average or…

The purposes of this study are to assess Swedish adults' reading and writing skills so that they can be compared with the corresponding skills of students in the comprehensive and upper secondary schools, and to investigate the extent to which adults' reading and writing activities can be described as satisfactory to their needs. The subjects of…

Twenty-seven seventh-grade students participated in a study designed to investigate the student rate of progress through the computer-assisted instruction (CAI) text in relation to ability and achievement. Measures were developed to determine the general reading rate for each individual and to notice any deviation from that rate. It was found that…

Relationships between spelling and reading have been found such that poor readers are often poor spellers, but good readers may or may not be poor spellers. Part of the reason for the seeming contradition may be that spelling requires precise knowledge of individual letter combinations whereas often as much meaning in reading can be obtained from…

This series of nine articles on dyslexia, or specific language disability, originally appeared in the Baltimore "Evening Sun" in response to increasing public interest regarding reading disabilities and handicaps. These articles summarize the methods of identifying and teaching these children and discuss the school's common failure to identify and…

Because reading is measured relatively, instead of absolutely, grade level is defined as the median score. As a result, half of those taking the test must score below grade level and half above. (Author/IRT)

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)