Proficient reading is a necessary skill for a quality life. While educators would like to believe that most students master the art of reading and can understand what they read, national reports indicate that learning to read and becoming a skilled reader is not mastered by all (No Child Left Behind Act, 2001; NICHD, 2000a). One component of…

Reading comprehension is a critical aspect of the reading process. Children who experience significant problems in reading comprehension are at risk for long-term academic and social problems. High-quality measures are needed for early, efficient, and effective identification of children in need of remediation in reading comprehension. Substantial…

Nearly 90% of intermediate and middle school students from low-income families in the United States are not proficient in reading. This action research project used a quasi-experimental design to determine the effectiveness of a multi-component reading intervention program for students in grades four through eight at Mother of Sorrows Catholic…

In the present study we examined the processing demands of three reading comprehension tests, namely the Woodcock-Johnson Passage Comprehension (WJPC), a Curriculum-Based Measure test (CBM-Maze), and a Recall test, in the early elementary years. Our investigation was theoretically motivated by Perfetti's Verbal Efficiency Theory and examined the…

Within a response to intervention model, educators increasingly use progress monitoring (PM) to support medium- to high-stakes decisions for individual students. For PM to serve these more demanding decisions requires more careful consideration of measurement error. That error should be calculated within a fixed linear regression model rather than…

This study examined the type of growth model that best fit within-year growth in oral reading fluency and between-student differences in growth. Participants were 2,465 students in grades 3-5. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses modeled curriculum-based measurement (CBM) oral reading fluency benchmark measures in fall, winter, and spring…

The purpose of the present study was twofold: First, the authors investigated if an extended version of the component model of reading (CMR; Model 2), including decoding rate and oral vocabulary comprehension, accounted for more of the variance in reading comprehension than the commonly used measures of the cognitive factors in the CMR. Second,…

Whether the simple view of reading (SVR) as incorporated in the componential model of reading (CMR) is applicable to other orthographies than English was explored in this study. Spanish, with transparent orthography and Chinese, with opaque orthography were selected because of their diverse characteristics. The first part reports a study of…

Numerous studies have identified isolated elements for successfully teaching early reading. However, very few studies have examined the effect of early reading programs that use a combination of multiple research-based practices. A 4-year longitudinal study starting with 243 students was conducted to determine the effects of the "Reading in…

The New York State Education Department (NYSED), in partnership with the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE), was granted funding as part of the "Striving Readers Project" to address the literacy needs of adolescent struggling readers early in middle school. The goal of the project was to implement and examine the impact of a…

This study investigated the component skills underlying reading fluency in a heterogeneous sample of 527 eighth grade students. Based on a hypothetical measurement model and successive testing of nested models, structural equation modeling revealed that naming speed, decoding, and language were uniquely associated with reading fluency. These…

The present study examined the stability (i.e., 4-month and 12-month test-retest reliability) of six selected school-based indices of adequate reading progress. The total sampling frame included between 3970 and 5655 schools depending on the index and research question. Each school had at least 40 second-grade students that had complete Oral…

Most theories of reading development assume a shift from slow sequential subword decoding to automatic processing of orthographic word forms. We hypothesized that this shift should be reflected in a concomitant shift in reading-related cognitive functions. The current study investigated the cognitive dynamics underlying reading development in a…

The aim of the present study was to use functional imaging to compare cortical activations involved in reading Hindi and English that differ markedly in terms of their orthographies by a group of late bilinguals, more fluent in Hindi (L1) than English (L2). English is alphabetic and linear, in that vowels and consonants are arranged sequentially.…

This article reviews the "Developmental Reading Assessment--Second Edition" (DRA2), a teacher-administered assessment that identifies students' instructional level, along with their strengths and weaknesses in reading. Once teachers calculate and interpret scores, the data can purportedly be used to inform, and possibly individualize,…