This booklet discusses the importance of all students being guaranteed a carefully crafted and appropriately balanced approach to reading instruction. Section 1, "Beginning Reading Instruction," discusses variation and inequity in reading instruction and reading skills nationwide. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has made it a priority to…

The federal Class-Size Reduction (CSR) Program, P.L. 105-277, begun in Fiscal Year 1999, represented a major federal commitment to help school districts hire additional qualified teachers, especially in the early elementary grades, so children would learn in smaller classes. The CSR program also allowed funds to be spent as professional…

Provides annotations of research studies in the areas of language, literature and media study, writing, and English teacher education. (HOD)

Research was undertaken to examine the effects of a critical mass policy (concentrating funds) on student achievement in compensatory education programs in California. No consistent, positive relationship was found between the level or composition of educational resources and achievement test scores in reading and mathematics. (MH)

Notes that reading aloud to children is the single most important activity for assuring success in reading. Describes types of children's books and offers guidelines for book selection. Discusses several guidelines that help early childhood professionals experience successful infant and toddler book reading sessions, and includes bibliography of…

Describes the use of mapping and portfolio assessment by school library media specialists to document changes in student reading, writing, and information use patterns. Topics discussed include new curriculum designs in language arts and social studies; information literacy; comparing earlier and later work; and student reflection. (Contains 37…

Supporters believe that the flexibility granted these new public schools allows them to be more innovative and responsive to student needs than traditional public schools are. But do students in charter schools learn more than their counterparts in traditional public schools? In order to answer this question, the authors have analyzed established…

Measures of Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, and interest in reading were administered to 92 second grade children in Hong Kong, while questionnaires on parental literacy practices were administered to their parents. In a hierarchical regression equation, maternal education, children's age and vocabulary skill predicted 18% of the…

After describing both average scores, dispersion, and social inequalities in achievement in the various countries included in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, this article relates those "products" to country economic and cultural characteristics. It then explores relations between student scores and…

In 1997, the National Institute of Child Health Development, under the direction of Congress and the Secretary of Education, created the National Reading Panel to study scientifically based reading research. The Reading First initiative under President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act focused on five of the panel's research topics: phonemic…

This study examined a new screening tool (Get Ready to Read) for assessing early reading skills in 73 three-year-old and 79 four-year-old children from low-income families and relating performance to more extensive assessments of phonological sensitivity and language skills (vocabulary and print knowledge) that have been found to be related to the…

Education aims to enable students not only to acquire knowledge but also to become capable and enthusiastic lifelong learners. Prior research has found that learning is more likely to be effective where a student plays a proactive role in the learning process. Such a proactive process, including learning on students' own initiative and strategies,…

This paper examines reading achievement when the maternal/paternal language has become a de facto second language. The performance of a cohort of Greek-Australian high school students (N = 270) on a diagnostic Greek reading test was significantly below that of pupils in second to fourth grades in Greece. The mean item difficulty for…

This study examined student, parent, and teacher perceptions of the use of testing accommodations and the relationship between student perceptions of testing accommodations and their disability status and grade level. Students with and without disabilities completed math and reading achievement tests with and without accommodations. Students,…

This article looks closely at a subset of books about literacy in and out of school by analyzing images of children learning and struggling to learn to read in realistic fiction. There are several books in which characters wish to learn to read, worry about being poor readers, and work hard to learn to read. These books raise important questions…