The capacity of secondary school teachers to support general literacy and to teach discipline-specific literacy skills depends upon their personal literacy competence. Diagnostic testing of 203 secondary teaching undergraduates at one Australian university revealed deficiencies in personal literacy competence that could affect their future…

This report supplements Jerrim (2012) where John Jerrim investigated the link between family background and children's reading tests across a series of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Previous studies for the Sutton Trust (Smithers 2012) have suggested that policy and provision for the highly able in…

The paper reports on a study designed to develop a risk model that can best predict single-word spelling in seven-year-old children when they were aged 4 and 5. Test measures, personal characteristics and environmental influences were all considered as variables from a community sample of 971 children. Strong concurrent correlations were found…

The main objective of this study is to determine the knowledge, education and attitudes of Chinese, Indian and Arab speaking students in Australia towards the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test. A questionnaire was administered to 200 students at six university language centers to investigate their overall response towards…

For a number of years now, South Africa, like many other countries, has been debating a major paradigm shift in education, a shift from learning and teaching, which focused primarily on content to learning and teaching focused on outcomes. One of the most dramatic trends in education over the past decade has been the shift towards the use of…

This study investigated differences in the phonological knowledge and reading skill of deaf adults using three experimental conditions that tested sensitivity to syllables, rhyme, and phonemes. Analysis of response latencies and accuracy in the three awareness tasks demonstrated that skilled deaf readers had superior phonological awareness skill…

Modern behavior-genetic studies of twins in the United States, Australia, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom show that genes account for most of the variance in children's reading ability by the end of the 1st year of formal reading instruction. Strong genetic influence continues across the grades, though the relevant genes vary for reading words…

This article describes the need for, and the structure and contents of, a reading program to help support children disadvantaged by reading difficulties. The program, delivered by trained and supported volunteers, lasts for 15 weeks. It uses a novel dual approach which aims to improve students' reading skills and simultaneously enhance their…

This research investigated whether spelling ability, an index of precise lexical representations, predicts the balance between bottom-up and top-down processing in online sentence processing among skilled readers, over and above contributions of reading ability, vocabulary, and working memory. The results showed that the combination of superior…

Response to Intervention (RTI) models of reading instruction have received much attention in the literature (Fuchs, Mock, Morgan, & Young, 2003; Hosp & Ardoin, 2008; Justice, 2006). Such models call for frequent and high-quality assessment of students' skills. One skill that is vital in the process of learning to read is the ability to…

Research on volunteer mentor programs has demonstrated mostly positive outcomes for mentees. As a result, many schools seek to attract and retain volunteers to assist children in need of support. The researchers interviewed 26 adult volunteers (from Australian companies) who help children with reading difficulties and examined intervention effects…

The Test of Everyday Reading Comprehension (TERC) has recently been presented as an addition to the armoury of tests available for assessing the skills of low-progress readers. While comparison data for students of different ages are presented together with evidence for high test reliability, there is, as yet, no published evidence for its…

How to compute and report subscores for a test that was originally designed for reporting scores on a unidimensional scale has been a topic of interest in recent years. In the research reported here, we describe an application of multidimensional item response theory to identify a subscore structure in a test designed for reporting results using a…

In this study it is aimed to describe and evaluate comparatively the reading literacy exam results, the finance of education and schools, and socio-cultural status of parents in Turkey and the top-five OECD countries, Finland, Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand respectively, in the light reports and publications by OECD regarding PISA 2003 and…

This paper provides Appendix D, Standard Error tables, for the full report, entitled. "Literacy, Numeracy, and Problem Solving in Technology-Rich Environments among U.S. Adults: Results from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies 2012. First Look. NCES 2014-008." The full report presents results of the Program…