Background: The No Child Left Behind Act legislation requires both higher standards and higher success rates at the same time. Failure of students to learn to read adequately as shown by national and state test results and the need for continued school success had prompted education officials to implement two reading programs--Voyager Universal…

Project RAISSE, which stands for Reading Assistance Initiative for Secondary School Educators, focuses on site-based content area study groups led by a content area teacher trained as a coach/literacy leader with some roles and responsibilities commensurate with a literacy coach. The goal of Project RAISSE is to enhance students' reading…

In this article, the authors report achievement outcomes of a multisite cluster randomized field trial of Open Court Reading 2005 (OCR), a K-6 literacy curriculum published by SRA/McGraw-Hill. The participants are 49 first-grade through fifth-grade classrooms from predominantly minority and poor contexts across the nation. Blocking by grade level…

Currently, there is limited research about the relationship between academic, mental health needs, and special education status among populations of incarcerated youth. Additionally, little is known about differences between special education and general education students, or about differences between detained and committed populations. This…

The aim of this study was to determine whether explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills would be an effective intervention strategy for children with early reading difficulties in a whole language instructional environment. Twenty-four 6- and 7-year-old struggling readers were randomly assigned to an…

Besides phonological information, printed words also contain visual, semantic, orthographic and often also syntactic cues. Skilled readers have acquired the command of this variety of cues incidentally, as a consequence of language development. Two naming task experiments assessed the effect of congruent versus incongruent phonological or…

The Motivation to Read Profile (MRP) is a public-domain instrument designed to provide teachers with an efficient and reliable way to assess reading motivation qualitatively and quantitatively by evaluating students' self-concept as readers and the value they place on reading. The MRP consists of two basic instruments: the Reading Survey (a…

A study assessed dimensions of children's reading motivations by giving them a revised version of the Motivations for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ). The MRQ is designed to assess 11 possible dimensions of reading motivations, including reading efficacy, several intrinsic and several extrinsic reading motivations, social aspects of reading, and the…

A study determined if either school entry age or gender had any effect on the reading achievement of 121 second-grade students from the Metuchen, New Jersey, public school district. The subjects were administered the California Achievement Test in the Spring of 1994. Results indicated that late starters scored significantly better than early…

This study investigated parents' perceptions of their child's reading abilities. Parents of 92 fourth grade students completed questionnaires to measure the perception parents held of their child's reading ability in relation to the ability of their child based on standardized test scores. Correlations between the Terra Nova Standardized Test and…

This policy brief provides background information to state leaders as they play an increasingly visible role in reading programs. It focuses on understanding how children learn to read; on clarifying what research says about effective reading approaches; on why so many students are not reading successfully; and on identifying what policymakers can…

A study investigated various developmental relationships between the attitudes of students toward reading and their reading achievement, with the intention of providing additional information concerning attitudes and attitude testing within school programs. Subjects, 876 students in grades 1 through 8 from a white, middle-class rural community,…

Compares two methods of teaching reading, concluding that junior college reading lab students benefit more from individually prescribed than from self-selected programs. (RB)

Provides evidence that teacher expectations are an important factor in determining reading success. (RB)