Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; n[subscript female] = 264,…

Potential students hoping to gauge the quality of courses at Portland State University might be forgiven for feeling confused. On the one hand, the University Studies program, which uses interdisciplinary seminars during the first two years to develop students' core skills, has been widely praised and emulated. The Council for Higher Education…

The population of Spanish-speaking families in Iowa has increased dramatically over the last decade. Needs assessment activities identified the need to reach out to these families with Extension educational programs designed to increase parenting skills. Iowa State University Extension prepared family life specialists to implement such parent…

This study investigated the perceptions of African American adult family members, their children, and teachers regarding how family members viewed their roles in assisting their elementary-aged children to become better readers. The study compared each of the subgroups' perceptions respectively regarding: (a) the child's reading level; (b) family…

Generalizability (G) theory was used with a sample of 37 third-grade students to assess the variability in words correct per minute (WCPM) scores caused by student skill and passage variability. Reliability-like coefficients and the SEM based on a specific number of assessments using different combinations of passages demonstrated how manipulating…

Two school districts that implemented a whole language curriculum were studied to determine how well students learned traditional reading and writing skills. Analysis of standardized testing, teacher and administrator interviews, and whole language theories indicated students were learning skills as well as they had with a traditional curriculum.…

Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, school leaders in Waterloo faced a gloomy horizon. Economic hardships, including declines in property values and rising unemployment, resulted in decreasing school enrollment and limited financial resources. By 1995, the district had accumulated several million dollars of debt. From 1995 to 2005, the student…

Like so many other states, Iowa faces the acute challenge of improving teacher quality. To address this problem, the state has been conducting and procuring a system over the last two years that will move Iowa into compliance with No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requirements in the areas of teacher quality and the core subjects of reading,…