Ability grouping is sometimes thought to exacerbate inequality by increasing achievement gaps; however, ability grouping may in fact benefit a fast growing and often marginalized student population: children from non-English-speaking home environments. The level-appropriate, small-group instruction received in reading ability groups may be…

Word reading fluency, as indexed by the fast and accurate identification of single words, predicts both general reading ability and reading comprehension. This study compared the effects of context training and isolated word training on subsequent measures of word reading fluency. Good and poor readers were given 12 repetitions of two sets of…

Conducted a meta-analysis of 46 studies addressing the validity of classifying poor readers by the discrepancy between IQ and reading skills. Children who are poor readers but do not display such a discrepancy are not eligible for special education under the learning disability category. Results provide little evidence in support of the validity…

This is a longitudinal case study of a child who taught herself to read before she went to school. This case study is drawn from a wider study of a group of precocious readers, all of whom had received no explicit instruction, but who had had positive literacy experiences in their homes. The subject of this study was able to read fluently at the…

Work teams sometimes include individuals with low levels of reading proficiency. Traditional team assessment instruments may not be suitable for use with such teams. A well-known teamwork instrument, the Team Excellence survey (LaFasto & Larson, 1987), was simplified to enhance readability. Fifty-two participants completed both the original and…

While the critical importance of phonological awareness (segmental phonology) to reading ability is well established, the potential role of prosody (suprasegmental phonology) in reading development has only recently been explored. This study examined the relationship between children's prosodic skills and reading ability. Hierarchical multiple…

This study compared the effects of two oral reading feedback strategies in improving the reading comprehension of eight school-age children with low reading ability. Participants were assigned to one of two intervention groups matched on age, grade, gender, and general reading performance. Intervention 1 (I1) used traditional decoding-based…

This qualitative study examines the perceptions and responses of struggling ninth-grade readers who are teaching reading to struggling second- and third-grade students in a cross-age tutoring program. The program was designed to overcome the entrenched, negative affective barriers that older students often bring to the required reading class by…

This study examined the role of motivational or attitudinal factors, such as achievement beliefs and behaviours, in learning to read before receiving formal instruction. A total of 200 Finnish children were examined at ages 5 and 6 and 1/2. Half of them (n = 107) had a familial risk for dyslexia. The results showed that those children who were…

The need for English as a Second Language (ESL) programs is growing in many correctional populations. Little information for correctional educators regarding effective practices for non-native speakers of English is available. Although concerns that exist for the mainstream correctional education population are similar to those for ESL students,…

Outlines two theoretical positions regarding the developmental origins of the phoneme as a unit for lexical representation and processing--the accessibility and emergent positions. Employs a Lexical Restructuring Model, which focuses on the role of vocabulary growth. Notes that this restructuring is viewed as an important precursor to the explicit…

A Delaware middle school schedules its summer school near the end of summer, requires students and parents to attend a preliminary meeting, and features strict attendance and behavior requirements. Students' placement depends on reading ability. An evaluation showed that vocabulary, reading, writing, and math scores increased for nearly 70% of…

A great deal is known about the effects of positive reinforcement on response acquisition; by contrast, much less research has been conducted on contingencies applied to errors. We examined the effects of response repetition as an error-correction procedure on the sight-word reading performance of 11 adults with developmental disabilities. Study 1…

This research examined the validity of the theoretical model of reading outlined by the Simple View of Reading when measuring reading ability with a performance-based reading test. Participants were 95 fourth-grade, students randomly sampled from four schools in an urban district. The test we studied employed a mixture of traditional…

This study had two major goals: to test the effect of administration method on the criterion validity of a commonly used working memory span test, the reading span task, and to examine the relationship between processing and storage in this task. With respect to the first goal, although experimenter- and participant-administered reading span tasks…