Practical and accessible, this book provides the first step-by-step guide to cognitive strategy instruction, which has been shown to be one of the most effective instructional techniques for students with learning problems. Presented are proven strategies that students can use to improve their self-regulated learning, study skills, and performance…

Constructivism refers to a collection of educational practices that are student-focused, meaning-based, process-oriented, interactive, and responsive to student personal interests and needs. In contrast, instructionism refers to a collection of educational practices that are teacher-focused, skill-based, product-oriented, non-interactive, and…

People who live in a democracy should be well informed of local, state, national, and international happenings. Students should become curious about news items and relate current happenings to the personal self. They must possess skills in word recognition and in diverse kinds of comprehension since reading is an important way to glean current…

Given the central role of television in most children's lives, it is important to understand its potential positive and negative effects on a variety of cognitive, academic, social, behavioral, and attitudinal outcomes. A study aims to explore the relation between early television viewing and later reading achievement. Motivating the research is…

Information provided for computerized adaptive test (CAT) simulees was compared under two conditions on two moderately correlated trait composites, mathematics and reading comprehension. The first condition used information provided by in-scale items alone, while the second condition used information provided by in- and out-of-scale items together…

Written for the fifth- and sixth-grade levels, this workbook gives students practice in using context clues and reading comprehension to apply punctuation rules, as well as in carefully reading and following directions. Noting that the activities are based on the idea that punctuation is necessary to make written communication clear, the…

This workbook is designed to help students expand their spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension skills through the study of roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Noting that roots, prefixes, and suffixes are the building blocks upon which all words are formed, the introduction contends that a thorough knowledge of these elements will greatly enhance…

This workbook is designed to help secondary-school students expand their spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension skills through the study of roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Noting that roots, prefixes, and suffixes are the building blocks upon which all words are formed, the introduction contends that a thorough knowledge of these elements will…

This research brief highlights key findings from a study that is a subset of a larger study being conducted jointly by NCSALL's John Strucker and Kentaro Yamamoto and Irwin Kirsch of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). This study builds on the proposition that a reader's comprehension performance is largely determined by his or her abilities in…

Students often fail to store new information in memory in a way that is accessible or useful. The information they have acquired is inert. This paper examines the inert knowledge problem in the context of learning from informational expository text. Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) have suggested a framework for understanding learning from expository…

This study, part of the "Study of Instructional Improvement," assessed the validity of quantitative measures of reading comprehension instruction derived from a language arts instructional log. The log was designed to measure the language arts instructional experiences individual students received over time, and measures from the log were to be…

These official scoring guide for reading/literature present details of the 6-point scoring system used in Oregon schools for the 1989-99 and 1999-2000 school years for grades 4-12. They list the attributes of students' responses to merit a score from 1 (lowest) to 6 (highest) in the areas of comprehension, extending understanding, reading…

This document lists the test and item specifications for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning for fourth grade reading. The test section of the document explains that the purpose of this test is to measure Washington fourth grade students' level of proficiency in the Essential Academic Learning Requirements in reading. The reading test…

This document outlines the test and item specifications for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning for tenth grade reading. The purpose of this test is to measure Washington tenth grade students' level of proficiency in the Essential Academic Learning Requirements in reading. The reading test described in the document contains literary,…

Past research shows the imperative nature of students having a high knowledge of vocabulary, particularly as it relates to their level of reading comprehension. This is especially true in the areas of science and social studies because of the nature of the subjects and their corresponding texts. Students' ability to retain and recall vocabulary…