Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex brain based disorder. Children are being diagnosed with ASD at an alarming rate. Students with ASD present with behaviors that interfere with their learning and the learning of others. These behaviors can be a challenge for the teachers and other staff who work with students with ASD. For the past 25…

Recent legislation such as No Child Left Behind and the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA) increasingly pressure teachers and schools to be accountable for instructional time in the form of improved test scores. As a result, students are given an increasing variety of assessments in a given school year in an attempt to measure academic…

Much research has been conducted on reading levels of elementary school students. Teachers search for learning experiences that lend inclusion to all genders and levels. How does this all lay out for the students? The initial trial of the study looks into the impact and differences of gender and/or reading level on areas such as school enjoyment,…

Commonly used literacy motivation assessments do not specifically explore literacy motivation in school. These context-general assessments may be problematic for struggling adolescent readers, as qualitative research documents that these adolescents exhibit different levels of cross-context motivation. The present study explores whether an…

As an initial step toward understanding which features of academic language make science-based expository text difficult for students with different English language proficiency (ELP) designations, this study investigated fifth-grade students' thoughts on text difficulty, their knowledge of the features of academic language, and the…

Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) has been proposed as a means to model the relation between examinee abilities and test responses. Three recent articles proved that when MIRT is used in ability estimation, an examinee's score could theoretically decrease due to a correct answer or increase due to an incorrect answer. The current…

This study examined the relationships of 3 levels of reading fluency--the individual word, the syntactic unit, and the whole passage--to reading comprehension among 278 5th graders heterogeneous in reading ability. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that reading fluency at each level related uniquely to performance on a standardized reading…

Examines the connections between oral reading abilities and spelling behaviors of third- and fifth-grade students. Confirms a strong relationship between spelling skill and oral reading ability, supporting the argument that a common body of conceptual word knowledge underlies both. (RS)

Two hundred twenty-six 5th and 6th graders were the subjects of this study to correlate amount of television viewing and reading scores. It was found that the average viewing time per week for girls was 28 hours and for boys 30 hours. A slight relationship was reported between reading ability and amount of leisure time spent watching television.…