Studies of proficient readers have shown that the use of certain strategies (e.g., relating personal background knowledge to text, attending to headings and images, and summarizing) is important for comprehension of challenging texts (Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2017; Duke et al., 2011; Goldman et al., 2016; Shanahan, Shanahan, &…

Many students with Down syndrome now receive reading instruction in either inclusion-focused or skill-based instructional settings. There are, however, varied results in the level of reading skills that students with Down syndrome attain. The focus of this study was to determine if there was a significant difference in the reading skill…

This study examined the effects of Reading Intervention for Adolescents, a 2-year extensive reading intervention targeting current and former English learners identified as struggling readers based on their performance on the state accountability assessment. Students who enrolled at three participating urban high schools were randomly assigned to…

In 2016, 20 states administered the ACT exam to all high school students. Of those 20 states, three use the ACT in their statewide testing program as an assessment for accountability at the high school level. States using the tests as part of an accountability system are required to submit results from an independent alignment study to the U.S.…

The purpose of this report is to compare individual pupil achievement on two high profile sets of assessments in England: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). The research in this report will add to well-documented differences between PISA and GCSEs to look at the…

Previous research has established two types of struggling readers: those who struggle with lower-level reading skills and those who struggle with higher-level reading skills (Cain & Oakhill, 2006; Perfetti, 2007). The latter group is commonly termed "poor comprehenders": readers who exhibit poor comprehension compared to peers with…

This study raises the question what makes school texts comprehensible by analyzing whether students' genre expectations about literary or expository texts moderate the impact of different forms of text cohesion on reading comprehension, even when the texts are similar regarding their genre. 754 students (Grade 9) from comprehensive schools read…

A few studies have indicated that dynamic measures of phonological awareness may contribute uniquely to the prediction of early reading development. However, standard control measures have been few and limited by floor effects, thus limiting their predictive value. The purpose of the present study was to examine the predictive value of a dynamic…

This article describes a descriptive study utilizing a picture protocol technique that integrated the use of photographs of good readers and children's representational drawings with informal conversations about their habits and behaviors before, during, and after reading. The research participants included 228 children in kindergarten through 5th…

Reading comprehension tests are often assumed to measure the same, or at least similar, constructs. Yet, reading is not a single but a multidimensional form of processing, which means that variations in terms of reading material and item design may emphasize one aspect of the construct at the cost of another. The educational systems in Denmark,…

Although sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice…

Solving non-routine problems is one of the most important skills for the 21st century. Traditional paper-pencil tests cannot assess this type of skill well because of their lack of interactivity and inability to capture procedural data. Tools such as MicroDYN and MicroFIN have proved to be trustworthy in assessing complex problem-solving…

The eye-tracking method was used to assess the influence of detailed, colorful illustrations on reading behaviors and learning outcomes. Based on participants' subjective ratings in a pre-study, we selected eight one-page human anatomy lessons. In the main study, participants learned these eight human anatomy lessons; four were accompanied by…

The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Comprehension Test, fourth edition (GMRT-4) and the ACT Reading Tests (ACT-R) were administered to 423 high school students in order to explore the similarities and dissimilarities of data produced through classical test theory (CTT) and item response theory (IRT) analysis. Despite the many advantages of IRT…

The purpose of the present study is to apply the item response theory (IRT) and testlet response theory (TRT) models to a reading comprehension test. This study applied the TRT models and the traditional IRT model to a seventh-grade reading comprehension test (n = 8,815) with eight testlets. These three models were compared to determine the best…