The aim of the study was to explore the Finnish preservice and inservice teachers' knowledge of language constructs relevant for literacy acquisition. A total of 150 preservice teachers and 74 inservice teachers participated in the study by filling out a questionnaire that assessed self-perceived expertise in reading instruction, knowledge of…

This study sought to investigate the level of knowledge of language constructs in a cohort of Australian teachers and to examine their self-rated ability and confidence in that knowledge. Seventy-eight teachers from schools across the Australian state of Victoria completed a questionnaire which included items from existing measures, as well as…

Teachers need to know a great deal, in many areas and in multiple ways. Teacher knowledge is a complex tapestry, and teachers must successfully weave the multiple threads. In this article, I present a conceptualisation of teacher knowledge that provides a framework for describing the complexity of teacher knowledge. The framework describes three…

More than half of all school-age children in the United States read below grade level (NCES, 2012a). Seventy-five percent of all special education referrals are due to poor reading skills (NCES, 2012b). The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services reports that 50% or more of students with disabilities score at or below the 20th…

The "Reading First" ("RF") program placed emphasis on professional development as a means of improving early elementary reading instruction. For many states literacy coaching was an important component of the professional development provided for teachers. The purpose of this article is to examine coaching in the early years of…

Targeted to children as young as 3 months old, there is a growing number of baby media products that claim to teach babies to read. This randomized controlled trial was designed to examine this claim by investigating the effects of a best-selling baby media product on reading development. One hundred and seventeen infants, ages 9 to 18 months,…

First grade teachers play a critical role in shaping the foundation for early literacy skills acquisition of primary students. Past research studies have indicated that primary students whose teachers followed the"Big 5 Ideas" to teach reading had higher reading abilities when compared to other students. The purpose of this current…

Recent Australian and international government reports refer to the importance of teacher knowledge in the sound structure of language and its relationship to beginning reading. In this study, a group of 162 pre-service teachers responded to a questionnaire including questions related to their attitudes towards using phonics instruction in the…

In this article, we describe a study of teachers' constructions of understandings about race and achievement in the context of a course on literacy learning and instruction. We documented the course activities, the readings, the assignments, and the teachers' responses related to race during the semester course. The lead researcher also…

Investigated the ability of 311 educators to discriminate instruction in reading comprehension from related activities. Results indicate that although 84 percent of teachers correctly identified comprehension instruction, they were unable to discriminate instruction from other types of activities. (RJC)

The research reported in this paper is focused directly on assessing the validity of the "Teaching Knowledge about Reading and Reading Practices" (TKRRP) assessment. Following the recommendations of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (APA/AERA, 1999), the authors see validation as a process of constructing an…

This paper reviews the recent theoretical and empirical literature relevant to metacognition and reading comprehension. The first chapter presents a definition of metacognition and considers different types of metacognitive knowledge and the interaction among these types. The second chapter is concerned with the methods of teaching…