Summer Opportunity to Accelerate Reading (SOAR) 2002 was AISD's summer reading program serving 2,251 students completing kindergarten through grade 2 in June 2002. Among students with valid reading scores, 86% made reading gains during the program.

This chapter provides an overview of statistical issues arising in work on educational assessment and school accountability, organized around some of the most consequential misunderstandings. The article proceeds via a series of nine vignettes describing misunderstandings of statistical uncertainty in educational assessment and school…

Home environments have been linked to cognitive development and academic performance, with suggestions that family factors exert more influence on language and literacy learning than on mathematics achievement. This study's purpose was to learn how selected family factors might be differentially related to primary grade achievement in reading and…

This study examined elements of the climate of middle-grades schools that are associated with schools' effectiveness in terms of the engagement and achievement of their students, with special emphasis on gender equity. Drawn from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, data on 9,020 eighth graders from 377 middle-grades schools were…

This report presents the results and sample items of a reading test and a mathematics test administered to Year 5 and Year 7 primary level students in 1989 in the Northern Territory of Australia. The Primary Assessment Program (PAP) monitors achievement in English and Mathematics in urban schools. All students in Years 5 and 7 are tested in…

This report describes the aggregated reading and mathematics performances of students in years 5 and 7 in urban Northern Territory (Australia) schools on the Primary Assessment Program (PAP) tests. The aggregated results are encouraging, with apparent gains in some reading tests over the preceding year, and no evidence of decline in the others.…

This study examined the factors contributing to the early school adjustment of children at risk of school failure from preschool enrollment to fourth grade. A longitudinal model that used data on 1,255 low-income, minority children was tested in an effort to bring about an improved understanding of the factors that influence a wide range of early…

With more than 100,000 computers in public schools across the United States, the impact of computer assisted instruction (CAI) on students' reading behavior needs to be evaluated. In reading laboratories, CAI has been found to provide an efficient and highly motivating means of teaching specific educational objectives. Yet, while computer…

A study examined the effectiveness of the Chapter 1 Corrective Reading Program, designed to provide supplementary reading and writing instruction to Chapter 1-eligible students from New York City nonpublic schools. During the 1988-89 school year, the program served a total of 7,943 students at 162 instructional sites. The total included 4,656…

Focusing on reinforcing students' reading skills at home, this pamphlet emphasizes that parents should read aloud to children, talk to them about their experiences, take them places, limit their television-watching, and take an interest in their reading progress. Children's success and interest in reading is said to depend largely on whether they…

South Carolina's School Incentive Reward Program Program (SIRP) based on year-to-year gains in reading and mathematics achievement, which seemed to have face validity, was evaluated, particularly its use of the relative gains of students in only the highest grade in the school as the basis for the awards. When this requirement was relaxed so that…

A study examined whether writing modeled from children's picture books would improve reading comprehension of fourth and fifth graders as much as traditional skills instruction. Subjects, 69 children reading at least one year below grade level from six Chapter 1 Colorado schools, were pretested for reading comprehension levels. Subjects were then…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 28 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) abled and disabled sixth grade readers' knowledge of story structure under three conditions, (2) the impact of typographical factors on the visual information…

This study, focusing on 165 public elementary schools in Hawaii, examined the use of test scores as measures of curriculum effectiveness and identified context and input variables that may impact on these measures of effectiveness. Demographic characteristics and test data on approximately 12,000 third graders were used to obtain 165 school…

This summary report from The Nation's Report Card offers a synthesis of findings from recent national assessments of American education for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students in a variety of subject areas. Areas covered include reading, writing, mathematics, science, American history, literature, and computer competence. Trends in academic…