The purpose of this article was to offer guidance to educators in evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and most effective uses of commercial reading assessment suites. We provide three resources to help educators who are responsible for making instructional decisions in reading using formal screening, benchmark, interim, and progress-monitoring…

This research examined the influence of contrasting instructional approaches on children's decision-making competence. A total of 764 fifth graders, mostly African Americans and Hispanic Americans, from 36 classrooms in eight public schools serving children from low-income families completed a six-week unit on wolf management, using either direct…

We describe a multiple-route model of reading development in which coarse-grained orthographic processing plays a key role in optimizing access to semantics via whole-word orthographic representations. This forms part of the direct orthographic route that gradually replaces phonological recoding during the initial phases of reading acquisition.…

The aim of this study is to understand the relationship between metacognition and students' everyday problem solving. Specifically, we were interested to find out whether regulation of cognition and knowledge of cognition are related to everyday problem solving and whether students who perform better in the decision-making problem will better…

We examined self-descriptions of children of Somali refugee families in Australian primary schools, focusing on how children's school-related skills and needs relate to the interpretive frames of mainstream and ethnic cultures. Three groups of Grade 5 and 6 children (Somali, Disadvantaged, Advantaged) made choices among school-related skills, and…

The present study used the lexical decision (making YES/NO decision) and the vocalization (naming) paradigms in two reaction time experiments to examine the cohesiveness of onset-rime and peak-coda in the syllable structure of English lexical items. The aim was to study the effect of sonority hierarchy of liquids, nasals and obstruents on the…

In this paper we review different methods for teachers to recommend accommodations in large scale tests. Then we present data on the stability of their judgments on variables relevant to this decision-making process. The outcomes from the judgments support the need for a more explicit model. Four general categories are presented: student…

This study assessed the immediate and short-term outcomes of adapting a culturally-grounded middle school program, "keepin' it REAL", for elementary school students. After curriculum adaptation, 10 schools were randomly assigned to the intervention in 5th grade with follow-up boosters in 6th grade; 13 schools were randomly assigned to the control…

Describes Be a Winner, an innovative drug education program in which uniformed law enforcement officers lead an eight-week instructional program at the fifth or sixth grade levels. Program evaluation indicated program decision-making skills improved as well as a positive change in some attitudes and beliefs concerning substance use. (Author/ABL)