This demonstration booklet illustrates the kind of exercises or test questions and tasks used in the assessment of student achievement in reading and writing by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 2002. Each student will be asked to complete the background section and the cognitive sections for one subject, and the…

The DC Reads program was first implemented during the 1997-1998 school year as a partnership among the Corporation for National Service; District of Columbia Public Schools; Communities in Schools (CIS), a nonprofit corporation; and six local universities, with Georgetown University acting as lead. During the 1998-1999 school year, it expanded to…

Summative evaluation of student achievement in reading emphasizes determining learner progress at the end of a unit of study, end of course, or end of the school year. Generally, state mandated tests stress an end of the school year percentile which is to indicate the present state of learner achievement. This paper discusses and analyzes…

The disparity between male and female career-bound students' abilities to read, comprehend, and use written information is a problem for high schools and their feeder middle grades. A primary reason for the difference is that teachers and administrators expect too little of male students. Educators need to recognize the importance of communication…

With reading, as with all academic content and skills, effective instruction is informed by sound assessment. Teachers' knowledge about classroom-embedded reading assessment must continue to be developed so that they can use the information it yields to make informed instructional decisions. At the same time, districts and schools must develop…

This report describes a program for increasing students' reading fluency and comprehension by giving them a variety of skills and strategies. The targeted population consisted of two elementary schools in a growing, lower to middle class community, located in central Illinois. The problems of lack of reading strategies were documented through data…

The goal of the study was to examine differences in mean National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics scores between public and private schools when selected characteristics of students and/or schools were taken into account. Among the student characteristics considered were gender, race/ethnicity, disability status,…

Noting that many teachers may be moving gradually toward holistic teaching while still using many traditional materials and practices, this book presents a reading inventory that retains some traditional methods and descriptions as well as naturalistic assessment methods and descriptions that are more consistent with current thinking about…

A study examined the effects of scheduling a language arts block at West Vigo Middle School (Indiana) in the 1993-94 school year in an attempt to show that ISTEP (Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress) language arts and reading NCE (Normal Curve Equivalent) scores for eighth graders would increase. ISTEP scores for 1993 (before the…

Whichever of the numerous ways of grouping pupils for instruction the teacher uses, pupils should benefit as much as possible from reading instruction. Team teaching stresses large, small, and individual methods of grouping for instructional purposes. No more than 20 pupils should be taught at a single time in large group instruction. Flexibility…

Teaching all children to read requires that every child receive excellent reading instruction, and that children who are struggling with reading receive additional instruction from professionals specifically prepared to teach them. The range of student achievement found in classrooms, with the inclusion of children who have various physical,…

Increasing concerns have been expressed about the differences between the achievements of boys and girls, especially in terms of literacy. This account of an action research project by a teacher-librarian explores the reading habits of a sample of boys and girls in S1 and S2 in a Scottish secondary school, and describes how the findings led to the…

This report presents the results of the third administration of the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP). These results are part of a long-term effort to gather data on the educational progress of Delaware students and to use the data to inform decisions about instruction. Reading, writing, and mathematics results are summarized in this report;…

This document contains materials directly related to the actual reading test of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA), including the reading rubric, released passages, selected-response questions with answer keys, performance tasks, and scored samples of students' responses to the tasks. All of these items may be duplicated to…

The middle school reading/literature instructor needs to determine where each student is in reading achievement and then assist each to achieve as optimally as possible. What might the teacher do to assist students to become good middle school readers? A major problem of middle schoolers is to be able to recognize a certain percent of words…