This speech by the United States Secretary of Education questions why so many American students are failed by the nation's educational systems. The speech cites data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) which finds that fewer than a third of the country's fourth graders can read proficiently at grade level. It also reports…

Southwest Educational Research Laboratory's (SEDL's) reading project examines early literacy in Grades K-2 and the prevention of early reading failure. The goals of this effort include the following: developing a framework of the cognitive foundations of learning to read that organizes research information; using that framework to organize…

This report presents the results of 18 months of work of the Maryland State Task Force on Reading, which investigated cutting edge research, best practices, and assessment data in order to formulate recommendations to guide programs in reading across the state. The report's center piece is a set of Design Principles for Improving Reading in…

This executive summary reports on the number of students not reading on grade level in all second and third grades throughout Louisiana. The report notes the provisions of the legislation that requires such data be generated, and discusses selection of the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) as the uniform assessment instrument to be…

This practical book grew out of a recent report written by the RAND Reading Study Group (RRSG), which proposed a national research agenda in the area of reading comprehension. In the book, RRSG members have expanded on their findings and translated them into clear recommendations to inform practice. The book explains research-based ways to plan…

This paper first gives a brief chronological overview of reading theory development and a short introduction to schema theory, and then comprehensively reviews, comments, and synthesizes research-based studies, published between 1980 and 2002, that examined the effect of text structure (reader effect and text effect) on L1 and L2 reading…

The purpose of this study was to study recreational reading in third, fourth, and fifth grade urban students in a school district in Southeastern Virginia. The widely-used Accelerated Reader (AR) was the tool examined in the promotion of recreational reading. The major research questions determined if recreational reading, using Accelerated…

The author endorses the approach to teaching phonics set out in recent documents (e.g. Progression in Phonics) that extend and supersede the approach set out earlier in the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) Framework for Teaching. Proposed are minor, evidence-driven amendments to this approach. The assumption that failure to achieve continuing…

The purpose of this three-year study was to investigate the participants' theoretical orientations to reading over time. By presenting an in-depth description of the thoughts and actions, as related to the research questions, of nine student teachers during their student teaching experience, and again three years later as elementary teachers, this…

This collection of articles provides background information about reading and includes the research base that has defined best practices in teaching reading. Section 1 of the collection, "The Big Picture," contains the following articles: "Reading the Right Way" (Bill Honig); "Statement of Dr. G. Reid Lyon, April 28,…

This paper investigates the validity of two current approaches for estimating text difficulty at the first-grade level--the Scale for Text Accessibility and Support-Grade 1 (STAS-1) and the Fountas/ Pinnell system--and analyzed student performance in relation to each. Subjects, 105 first graders in two schools, used "little books"--easy to read…

This report describes a plan to increase word recognition skills. The targeted population consists of first, second, and fourth grade students in upper middle, middle, and lower socioeconomic communities located in the suburbs outside of a large city. The problem of inadequate word recognition skills was documented through data revealing the…

This 21st Yearbook of the College Reading Association reflects the ongoing efforts of a group of scholars who have dedicated their professional lives to the advancement of literacy through inquiry that is linked with actual teaching and learning. Following the Presidential Address by Timothy V. Rasinski, "Outside of a Dog, a Book Is Man's…

Westerns Springs College in Auckland, New Zealand is an inner city coeducational secondary school of 670 multicultural and diverse students. Achievement test results in reading comprehension and vocabulary grouped students at the top and bottom of the scale. Reading was identified as a significant barrier to learning and in 1997 staff agreed to…

Standard operating procedures of the Reading Recovery program allow for students to be dropped from the program if they have not met the criterion for success after 20 weeks of participation. This paper follows the actions of over 600 first-grade Reading Recovery students in a medium-sized school district over the course of a complete year of…