This dissertation is about implicit prosody, the prosodic structure that readers assign during silent reading. The dissertation has several goals: determining which reading tasks are appropriate for studying implicit prosody, establishing how grammatical principles could guide incremental assignment of prosodic structure, and investigating how…

When you look at an image, what do you see? What does the image say to you? What do you think about? What meaning do you infer? These questions may blur together, but they can be expanded individually and uniquely into a multitude of responses. Your initial thoughts are yours. You are silently debating meaning within yourself. If I interject a new…

According to the National Reading Panel's (2000) report, there was not enough evidence in previous reading research to recommend the instructional practice of having students spend classroom time reading independently. The 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress report, however, reported that more than half of fourth grade and eighth grade…

Research has established a strong relationship between silent reading comprehension and prosodic reading fluency among young readers, but much remains unknown about this relationship among older readers (Breen, Kaswer, Van Dyke, Krivokapic, & Landi, 2016; Cypert & Petro, 2019). The goal of this study was to determine the impact of prosodic…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the individual experiences of five Poe High School alumni and to understand how these alumni made sense of their experiences with reading while participating in the Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) program. This study employed the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methodology to…

Reading interest is a significant predictor of reading achievement, with effects on both reading comprehension and vocabulary. We measured students' interest in reading as an estimate of duration of observable reading using whole intervals of silent-reading time. In Experiment 1, we assessed associations among interest in reading (i.e.,…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of reading modality (oral versus silent) and passage genre (narrative versus expository) on the reading comprehension of middle school students. A normative sample of sixth- and seventh-grade students (N = 175) read narrative and expository texts from the Qualitative Reading Inventory,…

The purpose of this qualitative grounded theory study was to discover the impact on adolescent reading motivation as students were given an opportunity to select recreational reading material and read consistently during class time. This study also explored the motivational impact of student engagement from dialogue with peers about their reading…

Individuals with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) often have reading challenges. They maintain or reestablish basic decoding and word recognition skills following injury, but problems with reading comprehension often persist. Practitioners have the potential to accommodate struggling readers by changing the presentational mode of text in a…

This study examines the efforts of student volunteers to motivate participation in a school-wide Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) program at a large urban high school. The researcher recruited a group of twenty student volunteers to visit classrooms and implement activities aimed at motivating their peers to read during SSR. Such activities help…

Although the field of school psychology currently calls upon practitioners to implement evidence-based interventions to address reading deficits, the literature base is limited and inconclusive when it comes to effectiveness of reading interventions at the high school level, especially with older adolescents with reading disabilities. The current…

Student engagement is a multidimensional construct believed to be a critical component for understanding school dropout (Christenson et al., 2008). The majority of related research has focused primarily on overt (academic and behavioral) rather than covert (psychological and cognitive) subtypes of engagement; however, there is evidence to suggest…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to discover if a connection exists between oral fluency and silent fluency. Comprehension was used as the consistent measurement instrument for the study. Understanding how oral fluency transitions to silent fluency helps educators understand how to assist students with this process. Most reading done to…

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

In response to concerns about poor engagement and achievement in reading, some high schools have implemented independent reading programs to give students time to read self-selected texts during school. Some schools are also adopting the Lexile framework as a tool for matching readers with challenging texts in order to improve reading motivation…