Discusses three key groups of participants in the process of literacy education and research--teachers, students, and researchers--and issues of equity (notably the gap between achievement of students of diverse backgrounds and their mainstream peers). Focuses on changing definitions of literacy, literature, and instruction. Explores connections…

Administers 23 psychometric measures of reading, writing, and related language processes to 102 elementary students and their parents. Notes results are consistent with claim of functional systems theory that the same language processes are orchestrated flexibly depending on task at hand. Finds number of language deficits uniquely predicted…

Assessment of early reading development is important for all stakeholders. It can identify children who need special instruction and provide useful information to parents as well as summative accounts of early achievement in schools. Researchers at the Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) investigated early reading…

The purpose of this study was to compare the reading achievement growth of fifth grade students following a year of participation in the Accelerated Reader program with the reading achievement growth of fifth grade students who did not participate in the Accelerated Reader program. The Terra Nova standardized achievement test was used as the…

During the summer vacation children who are economically disadvantaged experience declines in reading achievement, while middle- and high-income children improve. Previous research has demonstrated that the most widely implemented intervention -- sending economically disadvantaged students to summer school -- has not led to increases in reading…

This study examined the extent that motivational processes facilitate the comprehension of texts and the extent of culture's role in children's motivational processes of text comprehension. Relationships between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the amount of reading, past reading achievement, and text comprehension were examined by utilizing…

This article describes the use of curriculum-based measurement, specifically oral reading fluency, as a tool for monitoring students' overall reading achievement. A brief overview of curriculum-based measurement is provided as well as a description of procedures for collecting and graphing data. A case study illustrates the application of…

Two design experiments were conducted to improve the word recognition performance of students at risk of school failure. In Study 1, an Internet-based software from the TELE-Web project was used to remediate the word recognition performance of 4 students at risk of retention and reading disabilities in first grade. In Study 2, the Internet-based…

Schools that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" under NCLB face sanctions and may lose students to other schools. In smaller schools, random yearly variation in innate student ability and behavior can cause changes in scores that are beyond the influence of teachers. This study examines changes in reading and math scores across…

This article is a review of the literature related to the reading attitudes and the instructional methods of teaching reading. The article provides a synthesis of previous studies on the reading attitudes of elementary school students in the United States and also addresses a brief review of literature on historic and traditional methods of…

This study investigated the potential benefits of offering childcare providers professional development to promote preliteracy skills in young children. It was hypothesized that direct instruction to providers, through rigorous training and mentorship, would increase children's opportunities for reading success and thus, enhance their preliteracy…

In this article, the author, who teaches at an elementary school in an area where 96% of the students live below the poverty level and many families have few or no reading materials in their homes, describes how her school has managed to create a climate in which children find joy and self-expression through the writing of poetry. The school's…

The purpose of this article is to present the use of repeated readings with word boxes instruction with a sample of high school students who were classified with severe reading delays. Repeated readings and word boxes are designed to help children increase fluency and acquire word identification skills, respectively. These approaches were also…

With increased interest in the theory of multiple intelligences (MI), there is a need to identify and evaluate instruments designed to assess them. This study was designed to evaluate the reliability of the Teele Inventory of Multiple Intelligences (TIMI) and the relationship between intellectual preferences and reading achievement. The TIMI was…

A number of studies have shown that low-income and minority students undergo larger summer reading losses than their middle-class and White classmates, and that reading is the only activity that is consistently related to summer learning. The purpose of this study was to explore whether reading books during summer vacation improved fall reading…