This commentary explores a central issue for our times, online reading comprehension. It first defines three issues that have largely gone unnoticed as the Internet enters our classrooms: (1) literacy has become deictic; (2) effective online information use requires additional online reading comprehension practices, skills, and dispositions; and…

Reading is theorised as a key aspect of one's educational and vocational adjustment. The reading scores on the "Wide-Range Achievement Test 3" of 465 adult vocational assessment clients were examined. Reading varied across a range of social factors and the overall results were consistent with earlier studies, especially the "Adult…

Young people seen as "at risk" are a substantial focus across a wide range of policy and practice fields in national and international contexts. This article addresses two of those fields, youth homelessness and young people failing to obtain a basic education that will give them access to employment and full community participation. By…

Early childhood educators often make assumptions about the nature of families' understandings and what they do at home to support their young children's literacy and numeracy development and learning. Sometimes educator's have a limited understanding of children's every day experiences at home or in their community and the potential for these to…

This article explores aspects of early language and literacy that may predict later literacy development. It explores a range of assessment procedures used for oral language, vocabulary, sentence structure and phonology and early reading and writing. The article then describes a small-scale study which highlights the disconnections between the…

It is often assumed that differences in teacher characteristics are a major source of variability in children's educational achievements. We examine this assumption for early literacy achievement by calculating the correlations between pairs of twin children who either shared or did not share a teacher in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2.…

Late-emerging reading-accuracy difficulties are those found present in older students not showing reading-accuracy difficulties when tested in earlier years (Leach, Scarborough and Rescorla, 2003). This paper discusses the constructs of reading-accuracy and late-emerging reading-accuracy difficulties. It then discusses data from a cross-sectional…

A large gap is evident between the reading and related skills performance of Aboriginal students compared with that of their non-indigenous peers and this gap increases over the primary years of schooling. In this study, 34 students attended a tutorial centre in Sydney for older low-progress readers in Years 5 and 6, for two school terms. All…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 13th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2016), October 28-30, 2016, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by the University of Mannheim, Germany, and endorsed by the…

The Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the survey design and implementation processes of PIAAC yield high-quality and internationally comparable data. This document provides a revised version of the technical standards and guidelines originally…

Background: There is a great deal of evidence to support the robust relationship between phonological awareness and literacy development. Researchers are beginning to understand the relationship between the accuracy and distinctiveness of stored phonological representations and performance on phonological awareness tasks. However, many of the…

The importance of cognitive and language skills on reading and spelling development were investigated in a cross-linguistic longitudinal study of 737 English-speaking children (US/Australia) and 169 Scandinavian children (Norway/Sweden) from preschool to Kindergarten and Grade 1. The results revealed that phonological awareness and print knowledge…

This study considered ways of improving mathematical outcomes for urban Indigenous students. It focused on three primary schools in Western Australia and identified factors that were perceived to be having an impact on student learning. These included expectations for students, attendance rates, parent involvement, student literacy levels, student…

In this article, I consider social class and reading performance, outline a non-categorical approach to reading disability, describe the reading intervention program we have developed for older low-progress readers and seek to demonstrate how students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds can, and do, make substantial progress when offered…

Children (5 and 6 years old, n = 30) at familial risk of dyslexia received a home-based intervention that focused on phoneme awareness and letter knowledge in the year prior to formal reading instruction. The children were compared to a no-training at-risk control group (n = 27), which was selected a year earlier. After training, we found a small…