Increasing numbers of students now attending college lack the reading and study skills necessary for mastery of content area material. One approach to solving this problem is using learning assistance personnel as consultants to content area instructors. Some specific reading and study techniques that learning assistance instructors can help…

A series of research studies on the consistency of reading specialists' diagnoses of students with reading problems have indicated that clinical agreement has been astonishingly low. To investigate which factors seem to lead to consistency in clinical diagnosis, a study was conducted based on a theory of clinical problem solving called inquiry…

Thirty-eight college students were the subjects of a study designed to examine the efficacy of training graduate reading specialists through a diagnosis simulation program versus the use of a traditional child study approach. The major task of this investigation was to compare, by way of univariate or multivariate analysis, various combinations of…

A study compared the evaluations of junior and senior preservice teachers, supervising teachers, and reading specialists who observed a student's performance using the Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA). Four groups of subjects participated in the study. The first group consisted of 12 elementary education juniors who had just completed a…

Teacher educators and college level instructors may use a guided procedure for training classroom teachers and reading specialists to diagnose reading disorders utilizing case studies. The procedure involves distributing a detailed case study outline to students, with all important information that should be included in the case report also…

A study was conducted to determine the perceived quality of undergraduate and graduate programs in reading by former students in those programs. Survey forms were mailed to 851 persons whose names were provided as graduates of ninety colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Forms were returned from 404 persons holding the…

Studies show that while most clinicians agree on seven critical reading activities--instant word recognition, word meanings, oral reading, silent reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and attention/motivation--they reveal little agreement on the diagnoses and suggestions for remediation of reading problems. The computer assisted…

Even when reading improvement courses are provided for community college students with low reading ability, the students may be unable to apply to their content courses the skills learned in the reading courses. This paper suggests that reading teachers should work with individual content-course instructors to show them how to help their students…

The state of Georgia not only assesses the generic teaching competencies that are necessary for all teachers seeking certification, but also administers 28 separate criterion referenced tests, each for a different content-specialty area. Among the most recent of these tests is the Reading Specialist Test, the development of which involved…

In response to the expressed needs of students for preparation materials and classes relevant to graduate entrance examinations, a course designed to provide a review of math topics was created as part of a reading and study skills laboratory. Reading specialists are able to interface math teaching with their varied training in diagnosis,…

These two papers were presented at a two-part session on using a competency-based approach to secondary reading teacher preparation. The philosophy and rationale of a performance based approach to reading are discussed by Richard W. Burnett. Competency-based courses in secondary reading are contrasted with such courses in elementary reading and…