Since Emmett Betts first devised a framework of independent, instructional, and frustration reading levels in the 1940s, these levels have played a large role in classroom assessment and instruction. It is important for teachers to have a deep understanding of the research that supports the reading level framework. This article identifies four key…

The present study examined the role of attentional demand on infants' perseverative behavior in a noncommunicative looking version of an A-not-B task. The research aimed at clarifying age-related improvements in the attention process that presumably underlies the development of cognitive control. In a between-subjects design, forty 10-month-olds…

Due to changing demographics, our students are coming into schools with diverse life experiences, which do not always reflect the cultural reality of their schools. Given the research on the importance of using literature that is relevant to the students' background, this study sought to explore how first grade urban students connect to literature…

In this descriptive classroom study, we used video-based observations supplemented with teacher interviews to provide precise information about the instruction of comprehension strategies that naturally occurred in 4 Norwegian lower-secondary language arts classrooms while students worked with expository texts. The results showed that the teachers…

We used a questionnaire to identify university students with self-reported difficulties in reading acquisition during elementary school (self-report; n = 31). The performance of the self-report group on standardized measures of word and non-word reading and fluency, passage comprehension and reading rate, and phonological awareness was compared to…

In Geoff Edgers's biography of the Beatles, "Who Were the Beatles?", young readers learn of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison's youth and growth as musicians, the band's formation, and their contributions to music in popular culture. "General Music Today" columnist, Cardany provides music teachers with related music…

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more…

Learning to read--amazing as it is to small children and their parents--is one thing. Reading to learn, explains Susan Goldman of the University of Illinois at Chicago, is quite another. Are today's students able to use reading and writing to acquire knowledge, solve problems, and make decisions in academic, personal, and professional arenas? Do…

"Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition"[R] ("CIRC"[R]) is a reading and writing program for students in grades 2-6. It has three principal elements: story-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated language arts/writing. Daily lessons provide students with an opportunity to practice…

Rosenblatt's transactional theory and Pike's aesthetic model of reading both put the reader at the heart of the reading transaction. A re-envisionment of these approaches in terms of the pragmatist reader, a concept derived from Norbert Wiley's "pragmatism's self" and the findings of a recent case study into classroom reading, leads to a…

Language testing is not limited to assessing the performance of ordinary learners. It is also needed in other field such as assessing the ability of children with disabilities, those who have language disorders. Although a great deal of research has been carried out in the realm of stuttering, researchers still do not know why some children…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between prosodic oral reading and overall reading comprehension of second grade students. The sample consisted of ten students who were randomly selected from a second grade classroom. The students read aloud from the book "Bedtime for Frances" by Lillian and Russell Hoban for a…

The "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001 requires the US educational systems to provide effective instruction for all students to be successful in reading. It is generally accepted that there are five essential components for effective reading instruction: phonological awareness, alphabetic understanding, vocabulary, fluency, and reading…

Accelerated Reader's impact on student reading achievement has been debated in educational circles for some time. The effectiveness of this tool to motivate students and build reading comprehension depends on its usage and the training provided to teachers using it. In its training seminars, Renaissance Learning stresses that AR is to be used as a…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate anchoring effects on metacomprehension judgments as a function of fictitious information participants received about past peer performance. In Experiment 1 participants were randomly assigned to one of the three anchor groups that, in some cases, provided past peer performance averages in terms of a…