The self-defeating behavior of some students can often make even the most persistent of teachers to feel discouraged. The purpose of this article is to explain and provide a research-based rationale for the use of teacher verbal feedback prompts that convince students of their ability to succeed on a task. He discusses how to understand the…

Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, school leaders in Waterloo faced a gloomy horizon. Economic hardships, including declines in property values and rising unemployment, resulted in decreasing school enrollment and limited financial resources. By 1995, the district had accumulated several million dollars of debt. From 1995 to 2005, the student…

This study compared the reading comprehension abilities of learning disabled (LD) students with the performance of both their age-peers and their reading-level peers. Subjects were 16 seventh- and eighth-grade LD students, 16 normal achieving eighth graders, and 16 normal achieving fifth graders. To assess the use of prior knowledge under varying…

A study examined the reading profiles of adult poor readers at a community college and investigated the effectiveness of auditory perception training in the reading ability of these adults. Subjects, 30 students from varied ethnic backgrounds attending the Community College of Rhode Island who were registered for a reading and study skills course,…

Teachers must continuously appraise student progress in reading achievement. Techniques to facilitate this appraisal include (1) teacher observation, (2) checklists, (3) teacher written tests, (4) criterion referenced tests, (5) standardized tests, (6) rating scales, (7) anecdotal records, and (8) conferences. Once a comprehensive program of…

A three-year study was conducted at a California junior college to determine the number of college freshmen who needed assistance/counseling in reading achievement. In the first phase of the study (1974-1975), all entering freshmen were administered the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, Form C. The same instrument was used during the second phase of the…

To determine if auditory sequential memory (ASM) in young children can be improved through training and to discover the effects of such training on the reading scores of children with reading problems, a study was conducted involving 92 second and third graders. For purposes of this study, auditory sequential memory was defined as the ability to…

Researchers tested 136 third through sixth graders with the reading subtests of the "Iowa Test of Basic Skills," reading tests constructed from appropriate graded reading materials, and an oral cloze test constructed from a short story whose language resembled the oral language of the children. They computed correlations (within each grade level)…

A random sample of 300 seventh, eighth, and ninth grade students participated in a comparative study of performance on social studies cloze tests, social studies group reading inventories (GRI), and a popular standardized test (Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, Survey E). It was found that cloze tests and GRIs constructed from social studies content…

A study was undertaken to investigate the extent to which reading by students with varying skill levels is a text-driven or a concept-driven process; that is, it examined the conditions under which readers used context to identify words. The 72 second and third grade students in the study read target words that varied in decodability, frequency,…

This paper discusses the teaching of reading to secondary level and adult ineffective readers. The paper deals with the real costs of reading failures, the human frustration of not being able to read, and the role of reading in our society. It presents three brief studies of adults' inability to read; discusses ways of helping ineffective high…

The purpose of this study was to determine if students' definitions of reading and self-perceptions/attitudes as readers are related to word recognition and comprehension performances. The study also examined if students' definitions of reading were related to a tendency to exhibit learning difficulties. Subjects were the entire third-grade…

A study of adolescents in Hong Kong suggested that parents' behavior toward their children did affect children's achievement in reading and other verbal skills. A more democratic style of child rearing correlated with the development of good reading abilities. (MKM)

It turns out that in complying with the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), some states have decided to be a whole lot more generous than others in determining whether students are proficient at math and reading. Because each state selects its own testing system and sets its own passing scores, there is no direct way to compare the…

The Success for All (SAF) program was designed as a K-3 preventative and intensive intervention for students at risk of failing to learn to read for the purpose of bringing every student to grade level in reading by third grade. Key program elements include individualized tutoring, regrouping across grades into homogeneous reading classes, smaller…