Alarms about a "literacy crisis" among young people have been sounded on a regular basis for more than a century. Yet as each generation of students matures, it is able to accomplish the reading and writing tasks necessary for society to continue. Perhaps then, rather than sounding more alarms, it is time to consider what anxieties, particularly…

Because children living in poverty and minorities consistently demonstrate persistent reading difficulties (Adams, 1990), Congress intervened and passed the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2006) mandating that scientifically based reading research be implemented in the primary grades. Quantitative studies presented in the…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the implementation of a Response to Intervention framework had a positive impact on student reading achievement in urban elementary schools. This was a causal-comparative study that examined the reading performance of a sample of kindergarten through grade three students who experienced the Response to…

The importance of early identification of children at risk for reading failure is clearly established in the literature. The purpose of this longitudinal retrospective study was to further define the relationship between the development of prereading skills and later reading outcome in two groups of children; a group of reading-disabled children…

Direct, explicit, and systematic instruction of critical skills has been a hallmark of effective teaching for many years. In this study, we implemented a quasi-experimental pre-/post-test design with nonequivalent groups to determine the effectiveness of syllable skills instruction on reading achievement. Classes were randomly assigned to control…

"Reading Recovery"[R] is a short-term tutoring intervention designed to serve the lowest-achieving (bottom 20%) first-grade students. The goals of "Reading Recovery"[R] include: promoting literacy skills; reducing the number of first-grade students who are struggling to read; and preventing long-term reading difficulties. The…

Reading Recovery, a popular one-to-one tutoring program that Bush administration officials sought to shut out of a high-profile federal reading program, has gotten a rare thumbs-up from the federal What Works Clearinghouse. The positive rating comes after prominent researchers and federal reading officials tried to dissuade states and districts…

The goal of the RF program, Part B of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), is to have all children reading at grade level by the end of third grade. There is no legislative precedent for this program, focused as it is on preventing reading failure in the early elementary years (US Department of Education, April 2002). Because the design of…

Reading First, part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, seeks to lift reading achievement by encouraging the use of reading programs that have been scientifically proven to work. Reading First, which accounts for just 2 percent of federal education spending, is helping many districts to achieve promising results--including Richmond, Virginia,…

Various aspects of reading achievement and non-promotion policies as they affect Mexican Americans are investigated. (Author/JP)

"Reading Recovery"[R] is a short-term tutoring intervention program intended to serve the lowest achieving (bottom 20%) first-grade students. Students are chosen for "Reading Recovery"[R] by school staff, and selection is based on prior reading achievement, diagnostic testing (the Clay Observation Survey of Early Literacy…

This abstract bibliography is a reader's companion to the Ruth Strang monograph "Reading Diagnosis and Remediation," which was published jointly by the International Reading Association and the ERIC Clearinghouse on Retrieval of Information and Evaluation on Reading (ERIC/CRIER) in 1968. It contains complete citations and abstracts of all of the…

Points out that current alarmist rhetoric about widespread reading failure is not based on facts. (HOD)

Provides a rebuttal to a television interview on the "Phil Donahue Show" in which John H. Richards suggested that many people suffer from an incurable disease called dyslexia and will never be able to read. Insists that with hard work, dyslexics can learn to read. (MKM)

This study examined the heterogeneity within a sample of 140 urban second and third graders identified as at-risk for reading failure due to inefficient word and/or nonword reading. Cluster analyses were conducted using standardized factor scores from a four-factor structural equation model characterizing reading performance in this sample. These…