The ratings and rationales primary-age urban learners gave culturally relevant reading passages was the focus of this descriptive study. First- and second-grade students each read 30 researcher-developed passages reflecting the students' immediate and historical backgrounds. The students rated the passages and gave a reason for their ratings. A…

This study investigated how middle school students leverage information about bound Latin roots (e.g., voc in "advocate" and "vociferous") to infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and how instruction may facilitate morphological analysis using roots. A dynamic assessment of morphological analysis was administered to 29 sixth…

Dyslexia (DYS) can be defined as a reading disorder that is not caused by sensory or cognitive deficits, or by a lack of motivation or adequate reading instruction. Remediation of a deficit in phonological processing has been the focus of most DYS interventions to date, but these studies have had despairingly little impact on generalized reading…

Struggling readers, or students who read below grade level but have strong phonological awareness, may benefit from using instructional tools like graphic organizers (GOs) while reading. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between reading comprehension and teacher-generated graphic organizers (GOs) as they support…

Millions of adults in the United States lack the necessary literacy skills for most living wage jobs. For students from adult learning classes, we used a lexical decision task to measure their knowledge of words and we used a decision-making model (Ratcliff's, 1978, diffusion model) to abstract the mechanisms underlying their performance from…

This study analyzes Achieve3000, Lexia Core 5, and Imagine Learning software programs designed to increase student literacy levels in a six-week summer school program. The Brainology program was also used with 4th to 6th grade students to determine if there was an increase in growth mindset. Three elementary schools with the highest percentages of…

This study examines whether scores from an interim reading assessment in grade 9, the Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading--Florida Standards, can be used to identify students who may score below the college readiness benchmark on the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test and ACT Plan in grade 10. Using scores on an…

Background: Large-scale cross-national studies designed to measure student achievement use different social, cultural, economic and other background variables to explain observed differences in that achievement. Prior to their inclusion into a prediction model, these variables are commonly scaled into latent background indices. To allow…

In a longitudinal design, we measured 50 low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension development from Grades 7 to 9. There were 24 native Dutch and 26 language minority students. In addition, we assessed the roles of (a) linguistic knowledge, (b) metacognitive knowledge, and (c) reading fluency in predicting both the level and growth of…

Since at least the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, standardized test scores have served as the primary measures of public school effectiveness. Yet, such scores fail to measure the ultimate goal of education: maximizing happiness. This exploratory analysis assesses nation level associations between test scores and happiness, controlling…

The goal of this study was to examine how selected pressure points or areas of vulnerability are related to individual differences in reading comprehension and whether the importance of these pressure points varies as a function of the level of children's reading comprehension. A sample of 245 third-grade children were given an assessment battery…

The effective use of reading strategies has been recognized as an important way to increase reading comprehension in hypermedia environments. The purpose of the study was to explore whether metacognitive strategy use and access to hypermedia annotations facilitated reading comprehension based on English as a foreign language students' proficiency…

This article traces the experiences of two veteran elementary school teachers in the urban Southwest, who are positioned by district and state policy "texts" as insubordinate and failing, and who employ critical literacy practices to reconstruct and redesign these texts as they seek to create more equitable and humane conditions in…

Adults demonstrate difficulty and pronounced variability when developing second language (L2) grammatical knowledge and reading skills. We examine explanations in terms of individual differences in working memory (WM). Despite numerous studies, the association between WM and adult second language (L2) acquisition remains unclear, and longitudinal…

Research has found that peers influence the academic achievement of children. However, the mechanisms through which peers matter remain underexplored. The present study examined the relationship between peers' reading skills and children's own reading skills among 4,215 total second- and third-graders in 294 classrooms across 41 schools. One…