Reading First has been implemented in Nebraska since the 2004-5 academic year. In two rounds of funding and participation, schools have transformed the way they trained their teachers, measured student progress, and taught. This transformation is one of the hardest tasks in education and it has taken the considerable dedication of school personnel…

This book contains a collection of formal and informal reading assessments for use with students in Grades K-12. These assessments assist the teacher in targeting areas of strength and weakness, in monitoring student reading development, and in planning appropriate instruction. Unlike large-scale achievement tests, the majority of these…

Neurologist and middle school teacher Judy Willis connects what you do in the classroom to what happens in the brain when students learn how to read, including: (1) Why a classroom has to be safe and supportive in order to overcome barriers to reading fluency; (2) How to jumpstart students who are not well prepared for reading with activities that…

This document provides an executive summary of "Reading First Impact Study. Final Report. NCEE 2009-4038." The final report presents findings from the third and final year of the Reading First Impact Study (RFIS), a congressionally mandated evaluation of the federal government's initiative to help all children read at or above grade…

The purpose of this article is to describe a strategy called the Poetry Academy used to boost reading skills in elementary school students. The Poetry Academy paired struggling readers with a community volunteer to read poetry on a weekly schedule to practice fluency, work on word recognition abilities, and build confidence. A research study took…

This study involved an examination of the impact of a self-questioning strategy on the text-reader assisted comprehension skills of six students in grades five through eight with reading disabilities (RD). The purpose of this study was to determine the degree older children with RD comprehend text-reader assisted text that is at or above their…

Employing prosody skillfully, one of the cornerstones of fluent reading, is an indicator of text comprehension. Morphological knowledge has been shown to underlie lexical acquisition and to be related to reading development. The relationship between reading comprehension, prosodic reading and morphological knowledge was investigated in 51…

The current study replicated Gickling and Armstrong (1978) by using curriculum-based assessment for instructional design to match reading materials to skill levels of three third-graders who were struggling readers with low levels of on-task behavior. Difficulty levels of the reading passages were grouped according to ratios of known and unknown…

This study evaluated the effects of a fluency-based reading program with 15 second and third grade students and 15 matched controls. Gains in oral reading fluency on untrained CBM probes were evaluated using a matched-pairs group-comparison design, whereas immediate and two-day retention gains in oral reading fluency on trained passages were…

"Earobics"[R] is interactive software that provides students in pre-K through third grade with individual, systematic instruction in early literacy skills as students interact with animated characters. "Earobics[R] Foundations" is a version for pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, and first graders. "Earobics[R]…

Reviews the research on the relationship of metacognition to fluent reading and offers techniques for developing knowledge of and fluency in reading. (AEA)

Assesses some phonological tasks of well compensated, high-functioning dyslexics, aged 18, whose reading ability had improved to within one standard deviation of the normal population. Compares them with matched controls. Finds they performed well on word recognition tests but worse on nonword reading and spelling, and worse (in terms of speed) on…

Fourth graders (N=173) were administered curriculum-based oral reading fluency measures. A growth curve analysis was conducted to determine the relationship between students' slope in oral reading fluency and the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) reading assessment. Analyses showed statistically reliable cut-scores based on…

Examines the relationship between teachers' judgments versus actual performance on curriculum-based measures in reading was examined. Correlations between teacher judgment measures and student performance found that teachers were accurate reporters of student performance levels in reading. However, some questions were raised whether teachers were…

Examines the differential predictive bias of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) in reading across African American and Caucasian students. Results of this study suggest that CBM continues to appear to be a sensitive form of direct reading assessment in the local curriculum for both African American and Caucasian elementary-age students. (Contains…