State and district accountability systems are increasingly including retention in grade for young students who do not demonstrate adequate reading achievement levels. This article examines the research on the effectiveness of retention and other responses, including social promotion, and the growing parental practice of "academic redshirting" of…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal school-accountability law, is widely held to have accomplished one good thing: require states to publish test-score results in math and reading for each school in grades 3 through 8 and again in grade 10. The results appear to be telling parents whether their child's school is doing a better job than the…

The Reading Levels of a population of 93 Spanish deaf students were examined. All study participants had prelingual profound hearing loss; their ages ranged from 9 to 20 years. All were enrolled in compulsory education during 2002-2003 in the Canary Islands (Spain). They were evaluated with sentence and text comprehension subtests from the…

Well-chosen and wisely shared literature facilitates transitions and builds bridges in the lives of young children. Literature links are discussed and books are reviewed for infant, toddler, preschool, and primary age children and transitional readers.

The effective classroom reading instruction and early reading interventions is routinely misrepresented and exaggerated by the federal officials. Individual tutoring that produces on-level reading achievement is presented based on the misinterpretations of the research.

This study investigated the multilevel dimensionality of socioeconomic status and its relationship to reading achievement in 23 countries. Different factor structures of SES were found at different levels observations and in different countries. The study showed that the cultural dimension strongly related to student reading performance, while the…

In the current climate of accountability and research-based practices in reading instruction, professional development is often identified as one of the key elements needed to change the trajectory of progress for struggling readers and to ensure their ongoing success. Research on teacher quality and its impact on student achievement seems to…

Studied the possibility of using large-scale data and methods to study classroom practices in reading comprehension using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Findings suggest that such studies are both feasible and necessary. (SLD)

It's been heard, again and again, that phonics is the basis for learning to read. The philosophical pendulum swings from one point of view to another. One school of thought attests that readers must learn phonics in order to learn to read; another insists that whole words need to be learned first. This author contends that neither is correct--nor…

Alvermann introduces us to a new metaphor for thinking about the ways in which teachers might intervene in their students' reading lives: re/mediation. Ultimately, it involves fixing the conditions in which students learn rather than attempting to fix the students per se (remediation).

This article presents the reading performance of Hong Kong's 15-year-old students taking part in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2002. The objectives, design, and assessment instruments of PISA are first delineated and the assessment results will then be presented. Contrary to the general impression that the language…

The first in a series of long-awaited studies indicates that nationally certified teachers are more effective at raising their students' reading and math scores than are teachers who apply for the credential but do not receive it. Although critics have questioned the expenditure of state and district money on National Board for Professional…

With the passage of 2005 Wisconsin Act 125, private schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) are now required to administer a nationally normed standardized test annually in reading, mathematics, and science to their MPCP (a.k.a. "Choice") students enrolled in the 4th, 8th, and 10th grades. The law further…

Increasing demands for students to perform at higher levels at the middle school level have caused educators to closely examine the quality of personnel working with middle level students. Middle school advocates and professional organizations have claimed that the preparation of teachers and principals who work with middle school students should…

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, schools have been looking for resources that are proven, through research, to improve student achievement. The purpose of this article is to determine if there is a relationship between class size and student achievement among 137 school systems in Tennessee. The authors provide a review of the literature…