Pressured to comply with state and district mandates, teachers may follow scripted, back-to-basics lessons and, as a result, feel frustrated about the assaults on their professionalism and the prevalence of "test-prep pedagogy." As they experience relentless pressure to improve test scores, teachers face a constant challenge to maintain…

Statistics show that American students' reading and writing skills are lagging at a time when literacy skills are needed more than ever. Efforts to address low adolescent literacy levels meet numerous challenges, chief among them is the fact that formal literacy instruction ends for most students after the elementary grades. Career and technical…

This article explores the factors behind the success of a reading workshop at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, Maine. In the workshop, teachers start by being honest with students about what they do as readers. They acknowledge the guilt many of them grew up with--the feeling that there's a proper, rigorous way to read and that…

In this article, the author shares her journey with evidence-based reading instruction. Her experience with evidence-based reading instruction (as the adult basic education coordinator at Windham Adult Education in Windham, Maine) has been a journey of change both professionally and programmatically, and the students at Windham Adult Education are…

This paper describes the results of a study assessing the impact on field independence-dependence of decoding as a component of reading instruction for 225 first graders. Such drill appears to affect the ability to disembed, a component of field independence-dependence, but not to affect the ability to identify vertically. (Author)

Two articles are presented on the implementation of Reading Recovery in Maine. The first article, "Collaborative Efforts Can Make a Difference: The Development of Reading Recovery in Maine" articulates and shares the process which took place in Maine in the hope that it will assist interested stakeholders in other states in the…

Reading Recovery is a short-term intervention for first-grade children with reading and writing difficulties. This longitudinal study investigated the performance of a cohort of 1998 Reading Recovery students on later literacy achievement as measured by the 2001 Grade 4 Maine Educational Assessment (MEA). The results showed that the average MEA…

In Bangor, Maine, a seamless, continuous-progress performance assessment in reading is evolving--all because 24 first-grade teachers objected to using standardized achievement tests. Teachers have developed the Bangor Assessment of Reading (BAR), a triennial process of assessing fluency, meaning construction, comprehension, reading strategies, and…