Standardized testing is widely utilized to determine the levels of children's learning achievement. There has been a constant debate on how accurately standardized tests reflect children's achievement. Many practice teachers struggle with teaching to the test to meet the national criteria. An elementary teacher questioned the accuracy of the…

The primary goal of this research is to better understand my students' reading orientations--what they believe it means to be a successful reader. I also seek to identify the relationship between those beliefs and my teaching. The data come primarily from six focal students in my second-grade classroom in an urban public charter elementary school…

Without proficiency in content reading skills, seventh grade students were at risk of not being able to achieve understanding of what they read in non-fiction texts, a skill that is absolutely necessary for college-bound students. The purpose of this action research study was to investigate whether an approach that involved specific and focused…

This article reports that educators and experts across the country who work with English-language learners (ELLs) are moving toward a consensus that the federal Reading First program needs to be refined to become more effective for children acquiring English. Administrators in several big-city districts with large numbers of such students are…

This study addressed four research questions: (1) Can first graders comprehend and explain cohesive ties in reading?; (2) Can first graders comprehend and explain ungrammatical or ambiguous cohesive items in reading?; (3) Is the control of cohesive elements in reading related to measures of reading achievement in first grade?; and (4) What…

This paper examines the reading experiences, strategies, and curriculum preferences of university-level heritage language students. One hundred and twenty eight students enrolled in four different heritage language programs at UCLA--Korean, Russian, Thai, and Vietnamese--completed a survey about their exposure to print, early and current reading…