This yearlong quasi experimental study examined the effects of two approaches to guided reading on second-grade students' reading abilities. The 79 subjects were chosen as a nonprobability sample and served as the treatment and comparison groups. The groups were pre- and post tested using the Developmental Reading Assessment, Second Edition…

This article describes an action research project undertaken by a second grade teacher looking for research-based ways to increase his students' reading comprehension. He designed fifteen comprehension workstations and evaluated their effect on his second graders' reading comprehension scores as measured by district Imagination Station…

The struggling second and third graders in this mixed methods study increased their reading comprehension after a 10-week Readers Theatre podcasting project. Podcasting made the students aware of a wider audience, which enhanced the authenticity and social nature of the strategy, and made their performances permanent so they could be stored and…

Improving reading rate can be difficult for poor readers. In this experiment, we investigated the impact of improvement in reading rate on other aspects of reading, including word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension. Poor readers in Grades 2 or 4 (N = 123) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: practice reading text at their…

The purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions of second grade students about reading, themselves as readers, their motivation to read, and their subsequent reading achievement. Allowing students time to read independently during the school day and providing various reading materials in the classroom are options that some school…

The author cuts through the pressurized, strategy-overloaded, fluency-crazed atmosphere surrounding reading instruction to lay out the reading and writing workshop practices that are most effective in developing readers in the primary grades. She shares the daily how-tos needed to sustain a literacy block that engages children in authentic reading…

CD-ROM storybooks may facilitate reading comprehension for students who are struggling with reading comprehension. Therefore, the use of CD-ROM storybooks in the classroom as part of a reading instruction program, literacy center, or for independent reading time could benefit young readers. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

The goals of this study were to (a) develop an empirically based model regarding the development of fluent and automatic reading in the early elementary school years and (b) determine whether fluent text-reading skills provided benefits for reading comprehension beyond those accounted for by fluent word decoding. First-, second-, and third-grade…

Filling a crucial gap in the literature, this immensely practical volume presents innovative tools for helping K-3 students significantly increase their ability to make meaning from texts. The focus is on teaching the comprehension processes employed by expert readers, using a carefully sequenced combination of whole-class activities, specially…