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…

In this article we briefly examine the meta-analysis of systematic phonics instruction published in "Teaching Children to Read," the influential 2000 report by the National Reading Panel. A brief review of this study, and the ensuing reanalysis by Camilli, Vargas, and Yurecko, is given. Following this, we report new analyses that…

Examines the utility of teaching reading using rime-based reading strategies with prereaders. Measures rhyming, phoneme identity, letter-sound knowledge, phonological working memory, First Nations language speaking ability, and reading. Concludes that progress in phonological awareness and word reading can be enhanced in prereaders by adding…

The Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) was developed to help improve the teaching of reading and the acquisition of reading skills around the world, and was approved by the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) General Assembly as an essential component of the IEA's regular cycle of core studies,…

Extensive evidence exists demonstrating the benefits of repeated readings (RR) interventions at increasing students' fluency on intervention passages. Few studies however have examined the extent to which repeatedly reading one passage improves students' reading fluency on similar passages. Using an alternating treatment design, we examined the…

According to Bandura's social cognitive theory, self-efficacy and self-regulation are key processes that affect students' learning and achievement. This article discusses students' reading and writing performances using Zimmerman's four-phase social cognitive model of the development of self-regulatory competence. Modeling is an effective means of…

Charter school administrators weathered start-up woes, among them challenging students with unmet needs, verbal assaults, dwindling student enrollment, and a first-year budget deficit exceeding $200,000 to implement a reading improvement strategy that holds promise for helping at-risk students read better, a point particularly underscored…

State education departments, in discussions with Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast, identified low reading achievement as a critical issue for their students and expressed an interest in identifying effective strategies to promote the foundational skills in young students that might improve reading achievement. The Mississippi…

A study described first-grade teachers' beliefs and practices about reading instruction. Drawing from interview and observational data, 16 teachers from 4 districts in south-central Texas were placed on a continuum from skills-based to literature-based in relationship to their use of the basal. Only 2 teachers were found to rely solely on the…

A study explored the relationship between student behavior ("troubling" versus "non-troubling") and reading achievement among second-grade students. Of the 128 students enrolled in regular education classrooms at Paul Revere Elementary School (a public school in a southern suburb of Chicago), 30 were randomly selected to be a…

A study examined how well children in grades K-5 comprehended expository texts. Subjects for the study were 54 elementary children in a northeastern Ohio elementary school, 9 in each grade--3 of high ability, 3 of average ability, and 3 of low ability. Data collection was by 30 preservice elementary education majors in a reading methods class.…

A study investigated the development of vocabulary knowledge in elementary school children as a function of story reading for partially known and unknown words. Subjects, 43 fourth-grade low-middle to middle-class children from a rural elementary school in the southeastern United States, participated in a vocabulary checklist in which they…

The reading abilities of enlisted personnel are of interest to the Air Force for a number of reasons. One important reason is that the Air Force must ensure that airmen have the abilities necessary to read and comprehend training material and job aides such as technical orders (TOs). Since reading ability tends to differ among the Air Force…

A study evaluated the assertion that basal reading programs limit or control teachers' instructional decision making through a process referred to as "deskilling" by surveying elementary educators regarding their use of and opinions about basal reading programs. Responses from 553 of 1,000 randomly sampled International Reading…

A study explored word recognition and structural features of words as determinants of reading comprehension. Word recognition scores and comprehension scores for three age groups (6-7 years, 8-9 years, and 10-12 years) representing 1,200 children were used to examine the relationships of structural features of the word recognition task to…