A longitudinal study examined the development of decoding skills, reading comprehension skills, and spelling skills across the first three years of primary education in order to examine the relations among the variables in a dynamic causal model of the development of reading and spelling skills. Subjects, 310 first grade children in 12 schools…

In this attempt to explain parental discipline behaviors from an interactionist viewpoint that includes person and situation factors, the relationship of parental discipline behaviors to situation-specific feelings and cognitions and objective situational characteristics were examined. Data obtained from 300 families included (1) social…

A study determined the effectiveness of strategy instruction for children with reading problems. Subjects, 24 Dutch children in grades 4 to 6 from 2 schools for special education associated with a clinic for intensive child care, were divided into a control group and an experimental group. The experimental program consisted of 13-14 lessons, each…

A study examined the effectiveness of a training program in deriving word meanings through morphological analysis and from context. Subjects were 31 fourth-grade average and poor readers from 8 Dutch elementary schools. Four groups of students were assigned to the experimental group and four groups were assigned to the control group. The…

This study examines two kinds of French language tests originating from the Threshold-Level (T-Level) or Niveau-Seuil theory of language learning in the context of several linguistic and testing concepts: discrete-point testing with regard to notions and functions from T-Level theory, communicative context, and assessment of listening…

From l979 to l985, data were gathered from approximately 600 students in 24 Dutch elementary schools to determine changes occurring in the interrelationships among the reading skill components of decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling ability. Information for each student was obtained from reading performance test scores recorded at the end…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which problem analysis facilitated the subsequent processing of expository text, both for novices and a comparison group. A text on osmosis consisted of six-pages and was used as reading material. The ninth-grade students were considered novices because they were unfamiliar with the…

The construction of objective tests for native language reading comprehension is described. The tests were designed for the early secondary school years in several kinds of schools, vocational and non-vocational. The description focuses on the use of the Rasch model in test development, to develop a large pool of homogenous items and establish…

Conceptual and syntactic strategies in reading a foreign language are considered with attention to the functioning of the sentence parser. Topics of analysis include: the theoretical background and the educational relevance of the question of strategies; a study of the relative importance of the two parsing principles (syntactically guided…

The traditional multiple-choice reading comprehension test of English as a second language, used in the Dutch school-leaving examinations, has been criticized for its apparent lack of construct validity. The Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement has conducted a number of studies to determine whether there is a different skill…

In the Dutch national examinations, reading comprehension tests are used for all languages. For the native language, reading comprehension is tested with reading passages and related questions to which the test-taker provides his own response, not choosing from a group of alternatives. One problem encountered in testing with these items is…

This investigation--the first Dutch longitudinal research project on reading and spelling spanning the whole 6-year period of primary education--examined (1) whether it is possible to identify certain aspects of literacy--namely decoding skills, reading comprehension, and spelling skills--within verbal intelligence as latent variables, and…

This comparison of students' learning from reading books and from watching television uses Gavriel Salomon's model of learning effects, which is based on the amount of mental effort invested (AIME) in a medium as determining how deeply the information from that medium is processed. Mental effort, in turn, is predicted to depend on two perceptions…

The Rasch model for test analysis is a latent-trait model, which specifies the relationship between observable test performance and the unobservable traits or abilities assumed under test performance. In most cases, the test constructor has no clue as to whether the latent traits postulated by the model are indeed the abilities he wants to…

Since the mid-1960s, the use of objective testing in education, and multiple-choice tests in particular, has increased dramatically in the Netherlands. Since the founding of the Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement in 1968, the construction of many achievement tests has been concentrated there. This general changeover from…