Although reading comprehension research and instruction commonly focus on individuals' ability to extract meaning from text, eighth-grade students whose teachers chose to focus on engaged volitional reading, rather than comprehension, demonstrated expansive forms of meaning-making and purpose. Interviews and observations across two school years…

Purpose: Previous research shows that identity and academic learning are interdependent, so affecting one can affect the other. The purpose of this case study was to explore preservice English teachers' reading identities and their perceptions of reading identity development in the context of English classrooms. Design/methodology/approach: This…

The present study examined how 20 sixth-grade students made meaning while reading graphic novels. Participants completed multiple tasks during a 6-week period. Data sources comprised 1 reading survey, 2 teacher-student conferences, 5 small-group discussions, 1 visual stopping points assignment, and multiple journal entries. Grounded theory methods…

This study describes a program designed to improve reading comprehension through the selection, application, and transfer of appropriate reading strategies with both fictional and informational texts. The targeted population consisted of seventh and eighth grade middle school students in a middle-class community in the western suburbs of Chicago,…

Designed to measure attitudes toward reading at any specific point and to measure changes in attitude toward reading, this instrument consists of twenty items selected from "An Inventory of Reading Attitude" devised by the Department of Education in San Diego, California. These items were modified by being stated in behavioral terms and…

Designed to index the kinds of meaning relationships that children perceive to exist between words and their references, this test consists of 276 pairs comprising 24 categories. For each item of the test, the subjects were asked to rank each pair of statements depending on how well they thought the words on the left were described. Content…

This instrument was designed to determine whether by structuring and sequencing monosyllabic English words in two different patterns--administered with the same control procedures--first-grade children would be aided in detecting, identifying, and discriminating among single vowels and their combined forms; in associating them with their specific…

Designed to assess the ability of subjects to apply concrete operations to data in a reading format, and to determine if there is any difference with regard to type of paragraph or type of question, this test consists of four short paragraphs, each of which established one of the following operations: an additive classification, a multiplicative…

Designed to investigate how the beginning reader understands the antecedent/anaphora relationship in written discourse, this test contains four stories which were drawn from basal readers and modified so that the categories of pronouns were represented in proportion to their occurrence in the basal readers. Stories were further modified so that…

Based on research findings which suggest that stop and nasal sounds are difficult to discriminate by some children in the beginning years of school, this test is designed to appraise the ability of children to discriminate fine differentiations of stop and nasal sounds in minimal word-pair items. The major criteria for choice of test items were…

Designed to measure comprehension of intact and deleted sentence structures corresponding to selected deletion transformation rules, this test is intended to be used with primary age children. Eight test passages were constructed at each of the first reader and high second reader levels from stories in the Ginn Basic Reader so that each passage…

Designed to measure a person's knowledge of commonly used prefixes and root words, this test is composed of the twelve most frequently occurring prefixes and the twelve most frequently occurring root words derived from Latin. During the untimed test, students are directed to select the best meanings for prefixes and other word parts. Content…

Designed to test the effect upon comprehension of repatterning passages from a tenth grade social studies text by approximating the syntactic patterns found in a transformational analysis of the writing of the tenth grade subjects expected to read the text, this instrument was applied to 34 subjects who were asked to write 1,000 words of prose…

Designed to measure the changes in attitudes toward reading for pleasure of student groups in grades one to three, this instrument consists of 32 items stated in story form. Each item appears on a single page of the student's booklet, along with three faces representing happy, indifferent, and unhappy reactions. The administrator reads the item to…

Using various approaches to identify English language learners, several Pacific Region jurisdictions are developing English language proficiency standards and assessments aligned with those standards. Others are working on content standards, including language arts, and have expressed interest in developing English language proficiency standards…