As noted in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD's) "PISA 2000 Technical Report" (OECD, 2002), the Austrian sample for the PISA 2000 assessment did not adequately cover students enrolled in combined school and work-based vocational programmes as required by the OECD's technical standards for PISA. The…

The Ministry of National Education in Turkey initiated a new early reading instruction method in 2004. Analytical approach (Whole Language), as defined in the curriculum, was abandoned and phoneme based approach (Phonics) was introduced. This research has a two year longitudinal perspective and aims to collect the opinions of teachers about the…

The UK reading literacy data from the OECD PISA 2000 study are analysed using multilevel methods. The main analyses focus on the composite reading literacy scale resulting from the study and the explanatory variables used are 16 of the scales derived from answers given to the pupil questionnaire administered as part of the survey, together with…

This study identified student and school-level factors associated with student achievement on the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT), an examination that includes a student questionnaire examining home literacy practices. Linked student and school contextual data enabled the use of hierarchical linear modeling to complete the analyses…

This study examined the implementation of an early intervention program, Success for All (SFA), in elementary schools in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. A total of 543 at-risk students from four elementary schools participated in the study, with three schools serving as controls and one as the experimental site. Students completed achievement measures,…

This paper discusses literacy, language education, language achievement, and bilingual education policies and practices in Japan. The paper first describes the Japanese writing system (consisting of the "kana" and "kanji" scripts) and notes that students typically study English from grade 7 to the first 2 years of college. The…

A study investigated whether lowering the reading level of a health education pamphlet would increase comprehension by adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) readers. The reading level of a general pharmacy education handout was lowered by changing vocabulary, sentence structure, and organization, by highlighting the main idea of each point, and…

A study examined the effectiveness of a program designed to help the hardest-to-teach, lowest-achieving readers to function at the level of the same-aged peers. Subjects, 35 children referred from Reading Recovery who did not meet discontinuation criteria, worked with specially trained teachers for 30 minutes daily, 5 days a week. The main…

This study examined the actual performance of lower-achieving candidates in Standard Grade English. Information was collected over two years from the examination scripts and folios of course work of over 300 low-achieving students in grades three through six at several large schools throughout Scotland. A number of schools were visited to study…

This study examined rural/urban and sex differences in achievement in reading, language, and mathematics for 4918 students in grades 4, 7, and 10 from a midwestern province in Canada. Particular attention was given to subskill and sex differences in mathematics achievement. Each student was administered a mental ability test and an achievement…

A study investigated whether instructors need to undertake in-depth training in miscue analysis as reflected in the Reading Miscue Inventory (RMI) to carry out competent evaluations of children's reading ability, or whether training in the Reading Appraisal Guide (RAG) can be equally effective. The study was carried out at Melbourne College in…

Presenting a brief history of the rural village school in Great Britain, this paper addresses the pros and cons of consolidation. Drawing upon a Schools' Council survey (1975), research conducted in North Wales re: population decrease, and research on more than 600 pupils in 26 schools re: reading attainment, the problems of cost are analyzed in…

This document lists reading research studies undertaken in Britain in recent years. Studies undertaken for higher degrees in British universities, funded by institutions such as the Schools Council or the Department of Education and Science, or conducted as part of the work of schools' remedial or psychological services are listed. Each listing…

The third in a series concerning some implications of learners' cognitive style for the development of reading competence, this paper reports on a study that was concerned with the effectiveness and efficiency with which ninth grade field dependent and field independent readers processed prose in silent reading at three difficulty levels. Results…

Approximately 4,000 children took part in a study of the reading attainments of children from different social-class backgrounds in Irish primary schools to find out if the progessive reading gap between children from different home backgrounds that has been observed in other countries could also be found in Irish school children. Tests were…