Against the backdrop of growing international concern for a narrowing view of early literacy, this study was initiated to determine how teachers of four-year-olds view their task of fostering early literacy. This paper reports on the first steps to design and validate an instrument which captures teachers' perceptions of early literacy content…

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the…

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)…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between the amounts of time that U.S. and Chilean students spend on conventional academic reading, extracurricular reading, and Facebook and also to report the types of materials they prefer to read. The study surveyed students in the United States (n = 1,265) and Chile (n = 2,076)…

A literacy clinic is an ideal setting where research and exploration often lead to breakthroughs in reading remediation; that information can then be transferred to classroom instruction (Morris, 2003). Although it is clear that literacy clinics should be structured around what works for their student populations, there remains ambiguity…

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducted the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a multi-domain adult skills assessment with an extensive background questionnaire, in 2012. PIAAC is a global effort to understand how individuals' education, workplace experiences, and other…

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 reading framework for the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) presents the assessment's conceptual base and discusses its content. The framework describes the types of texts and questions that should be included in the assessment, as well as how the questions should be designed and scored. This report provides highlights of…

Researchers have used various theories to explain deaf individuals' reading skills, including the dual route reading theory, the orthographic depth theory, and the early language access theory. This study tested 4 groups of children--hearing with dyslexia, hearing without dyslexia, deaf early signers, and deaf late signers (N = 857)--from 4…

Objective: Issues regarding the readability of self-report assessment instruments, methods for establishing the reading ability level of respondents, and guidelines for development of scales designed for marginal readers have been inconsistently addressed in the literature. A recent study by McHugh and Behar (2009) provided new findings relevant…

The Internet has become the primary source for obtaining information at work, at home, and for school. Because Internet reading increasingly is becoming one of the central ways students are acquiring information, in 2016, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) was extended to include ePIRLS--an innovative assessment of online…

When U.S. children enter school, their reading skills vary widely by their socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and immigrant status. Because these literacy gaps exist before children enter school, observes Jane Waldfogel, the disparities must arise from conditions outside of schools--from the children's families and communities. And the same…

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…

Only about one-third of children attending school in the United States can read proficiently at fourth grade, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as "the nation's report card." If that is not dismaying enough, consider the outcomes for the nation's most vulnerable students. The first eight years of…

Although children with Down syndrome (DS) can learn to read, few studies have explored parental perspectives on the reading development of this group of children. This article, written by Leila Ricci and Anna Osipova, from California State University, explores visions and expectations regarding reading held by parents of children with Down…