Academic Literacy was a year-long course focused on reading strategy development for all ninth graders at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in the San Francisco Unified School District. Course goals were to help students become engaged, fluent, and competent readers of the variety of texts necessary for them to master to be successful in high…

A study was conducted to ascertain the relationship between volunteer reading tutors and the reading scores of the tutored students in the primary grades. Two groups of children were studied (N=33), and their progress in reading was observed over a period of six months. One group of children from an urban public school worked with a volunteer…

In recent years there has been an increased interest in developing the basic reading and writing skills of primary students at risk for academic failure. Problems associated with typical evaluations of programmatic impact on students' literacy skills include the amount of testing time, sensitivity to smaller levels of growth, or, as in the case of…

Reading is a multileveled, interactive, and hypothesis-generating process in which readers construct a meaningful representation of text by using their knowledge of the world and of language. If reading involves grasping the significance of an input depending on the reader's mental cognitive-perceptual situation, then there is a form of background…

Based on proven research, this booklet summarizes essential information of how children learn to read and how to teach beginning reading skills. After a foreword, the booklet discusses the Illinois Right to Read Initiative (a blueprint for significantly improving reading and literacy among students over the next five years) and summarizes the…

A study investigated the use of graphic organizers in classrooms--specifically examined was the use of graphic organizers as visual and organizational tools to facilitate student comprehension of expository text. Subjects consisted of 107 kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers (both regular and special educators) teaching in rural and urban…

This collection reflects the stance that a truly balanced approach to reading instruction will focus not only on reading but on literacy; integrate language and literacy across disciplines; attend to reading, writing, and other skills and strategies in context; and reflect a coherent integration of as broad a research base as possible. Following a…

A study hypothesized that auditory input does not increase the comprehension of students. Forty Basic Skills English students in a suburban high school were identified for this study. They were grouped according to class section and assigned randomly to treatments. Two of the sections read narrative and persuasive/argument texts silently and were…

In the mystery genre, the one characteristic that the enduring figures of Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, and Encyclopedia Brown have in common is a rational mind. The source of their strength is their ability to think and think well. A study examined some typical examples of the mystery genre in young adult literature and surveyed children and…

A study investigated whether Louisiana school districts and schools involved in the SPUR (Special Plan Upgrading Reading) program were implementing and maintaining essential elements of the project five years after termination of state funding and external support. Subjects were the 66 superintendents or their designee at the district level as…

This study describes a program designed to increase reading strategies in the first grade. The targeted population consisted of first grade students in a growing urban community in the Midwest. Evidence for the existence of the problem included records of low district and building reading assessments and academic grades to measure reading…

This report describes one of a series of pilot studies conducted to evaluate the instructional effectiveness of the Harcourt Reading Program. The study focused on the program's primary levels and included Grades 1 and 3. Participants, teachers who had not used the program previously, were encouraged to select one theme to pilot over a 6-week…

This position paper contends that the whole language approach to reading instruction has been disproved by research and evaluation but still pervades textbooks for teachers, instructional materials for classroom use, some states' language-arts standards and other policy documents, teacher licensing requirements and preparation programs, and the…

Accelerated Reader is a computer program designed by Advantage Learning Systems to assess students' reading comprehension levels and keep detailed and accurate reports of such findings. This research studied the Accelerated Reader program with a second grade class over a 6-week time frame. One class of 20 students read books picked from the…

The goal of this study was to describe and measure the effects of continuous, as-needed intervention in reading for 92 children in Grades 1-2, to determine whether the severity of reading disability (RD) could be significantly reduced in the catchment schools. The authors hoped that this kind of professional development would help to discriminate…