Running Records provide a standardized method for recording and assessing students' oral reading behaviors and are excellent formative assessment tools to guide instructional decision-making. This study expands on prior Running Record reliability work by evaluating the extent to which external raters and teachers consistently assessed students'…

We report on a meta-analysis designed to test the theory that instruction that involves direct teaching of academic vocabulary and teaching strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words develops students' abilities to infer new words' meanings and builds students' overall vocabulary knowledge. We meta-analyzed 39 experimental and…

Becoming a fluent reader has been established as important to reading comprehension. Prosody (expression) is an indicator of fluent reading that is linked to improved comprehension in students across elementary, middle, and secondary grades. Fluent reading is most often evaluated by classroom teachers through the use of a rubric, with the most…

This study examined ratings of fourth graders' oral reading expression. Randomly assigned participants (n = 36) practiced repeated readings using narrative or informational passages for 7 weeks. After this period raters used the "Multidimensional Fluency Scale" (MFS) on two separate occasions to rate students' expressive…

This study compared reading rate to reading fluency (as measured by a rating scale). After listening to first graders read short passages, we assigned an overall fluency rating (low, average, or high) to each reading. We then used predictive discriminant analyses to determine which of five measures--accuracy, rate (objective); accuracy, phrasing,…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of two comprehensive argumentative writing interventions--Text Structure Instruction (TSI) and Text Structure Revision Instruction (TSRI)--on the eighth-grade students' ability to compose convincing essays that include structural elements of argumentative discourse. Both treatment groups…

Although several different reading fluency intervention approaches appear promising for adolescents who are struggling readers, few studies have directly compared various approaches. The purpose of this study was twofold: 1) to determine the relative effects of word-oriented, fluency-oriented, comprehension-oriented, and multi-component…

Concludes that the Cloze Reading Inventory and its coding form can be reliably employed by a variety of teachers for a variety of grade levels and passages. (FL)