This study investigated effective teaching factors and student reading strategies as predictors of student reading achievement in the United States and China. Participants were 10,348 students in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, 5115 from China and 5233 from the United States. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA)…

This essay raises concerns over the future direction for educational aid designed to promote literacy in developing countries. The essay focuses on the EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment) initiative in Africa. At one level, this essay challenges the claims for empirical and research-based support for the EGRA. At a broader level, this essay…

This study compared children's Spanish reading performance across 2 reading intervention conditions: small group versus individual (teacher-student). Six second-grade Costa Rican students with low Spanish reading ability participated in the study. An alternating-treatments design was used to compare the relative effectiveness of the 2…

Although reading fluency is one of the five essential early-reading skills students must develop, many elementary-aged students in the United States do not read age-appropriate material fluently. As such, small-group interventions are practical and often more time efficient than individualized interventions aimed to address this problem. However,…

In this study, I examined reported frequency of text messaging, use of textese and literacy skills (reading accuracy, spelling and reading fluency) in a sample of American college students. Participants reported using text messaging, social networking sites and textese more often than was reported in previous (2009) research, and their frequency…

The purpose of this study was to identify subgroups of adult basic education (ABE) learners with different profiles of skills in the core reading components of decoding, word recognition, spelling, fluency, and comprehension. The analysis uses factor scores of those 5 reading components from on a prior investigation of the reliability and…

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy of adults in the United States for the first time since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey. The assessment was administered to more than 19,000 adults (ages 16 and older) in households and prisons. The tasks included on the assessment were designed to measure…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has mandated that all public school students will be reading at grade level by the 2013-2014 school year. Florida has embarked on an agenda to ensure that the kindergarten through high school student population is reading at or above grade level by 2014. Many of Florida's low-performing student population,…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the reliability and construct validity of measures of reading component skills with a sample of adult basic education (ABE) learners, including both native and nonnative English speakers, and to describe the performance of those learners on the measures. Investigation of measures of reading components…

The Partnership for Reading (PFR) in the United States has recently thrown its hat into the ring of adult literacy research and practice. Its information about adult literacy comes, almost entirely, from the National Reading Panel's (NRP) data on children. Building its case from the NRP data, the PFR advocates for a narrow, school-based conception…