A study examined the first grade materials in five new basal programs submitted for the 1993 Texas state adoption. (The programs were those of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Houghton Mifflin; Scott Foresman; Macmillan/McGraw-Hill; and Silver Burdett Ginn). These series are compared with program materials currently in use in the state. The analysis…

Two studies examined the validity of a model of procedural document processing, and the relationships among document features, reader characteristics, and successful completion of a button-sewing task. The first study tested three information sources. Subjects were 12 seventh-grade, 12 tenth-grade, and 12 adult students who used 2 commercially…

A study investigated why children choose not to read. Subjects, 21 fifth-grade students attending a Catholic school in Vancouver, British Columbia, completed "clock-sheets" detailing their activities outside of school over a 5-day period, were administered a measure of locus of control, completed a reading attitude survey, and were…

A study looked at one problem teachers have when implementing an individualized reading program, the amount of time it can take students to choose a book to read. A database of the classroom library (consisting of about 600 novels) used by two fifth-grade language arts classes was created using Hypercard for the Macintosh. This database was…

Based on Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reader response, the studies collected in this book present findings and recommendations that contribute to the understanding of how children create meaning from stories, how they acquire literacy skills to express that meaning, and what role educators play in these literary processes. The book…

The purpose of a Reading Recovery project was to gather data on an alternative method of teaching reading to students who were experiencing difficulties with the reading process. Four students a year (attending the Clara Tyner Elementary school in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) were selected from grade 1 and beginning grade 2 for a total of 10…

A study, considering the needs of both classroom teachers and university-based instructors, examined how teachers delineated thematic instruction and translated that conception into practice. A total of 20 teachers, representing 17 classrooms, were observed as they implemented thematic instruction. Team-teaching was observed in two classrooms with…

An exploratory study tracked the year-long development of second graders' use of the decoding by analogy strategy to generate spellings. Subjects, 20 second graders form one intact classroom in a middle-class neighborhood school in the intermountain west, were taught decoding by analogy through direct instruction and by incorporating the strategy…

A study examined the ways teachers and children in a preschool classroom enacted informal book-reading and other informal book-related events. Four key patterns in children's activities and teachers' curricular responses were identified: (1) children naturally selected their own "themes" for reading at the book center, and often these themes were…

A study examined the effectiveness of a program designed to help the hardest-to-teach, lowest-achieving readers to function at the level of the same-aged peers. Subjects, 35 children referred from Reading Recovery who did not meet discontinuation criteria, worked with specially trained teachers for 30 minutes daily, 5 days a week. The main…

This study assessed the effectiveness of tutoring intervention for sight word acquisition and determined whether any progress was matched by improved reading fluency, reading rate, and sight word identification. Nine middle school students from Hillside, New Jersey were selected based upon teacher referral for poor reading skills. "Edward…

A study examined the reading strategies of a "reluctant reader," a bright and accomplished fifth grader whose achievements had not as yet included a love of reading or very good comprehension skills. Subject of the study, a female, was an excellent student at a private school where whole language, reading and writing groups, and…

A study examined the relationships among elementary school principals' knowledge of reading, principals' involvement in the school reading program, teachers' knowledge of reading, and elementary school student reading achievement. Subjects, 20 principals and 68 teachers from 20 schools in a small western city, responded to a 20-item survey…

A study determined whether using reader response logs in an introductory college literature class would prove to be an effective method of helping students learn to apply the critical methodology important to increasing understanding of literature. Subjects, 33 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory literature course, wrote response…

A study investigated the attention of 116 children in 6 second- and third-grade classrooms while they participated in 4 lessons involving progressively more difficult stories. Analysis of videotapes of the lessons revealed that the likelihood of a lapse of attention was highest during the first 15 seconds of attention episodes. Lapses in attention…