This dissertation study examines the effects of four teacher-led reading activities recommended by the reading teaching policy and student independent reading activity on the development of English language learners (ELL) reading proficiency at fourth grade in U.S. elementary schools. In this study, I first introduce the significance of studying…

Recent findings of passageless comprehension by college readers have added to the fallout with standardized reading comprehension tests and have called for theoretically and psychometrically stronger options. Reviewing the research literature, this paper suggests the maze test as an option for college reading assessment. The existing evidence,…

This investigation compared readability formulae to publishers' identified reading levels in science-based elementary readers. Nine well-established readability indices were calculated and comparisons were made with the publishers' identified grade designations and between different genres of text. Results revealed considerable variance among the…

The new common core standards for mathematics demand that students (and teachers!) exhibit deeper conceptual understanding. That's music to the ears of education professor John Tapper, who says teachers have overemphasized teaching procedures--and getting right answers. In his new book, "Solving for Why," he makes a powerful case for moving beyond…

The authors examined the strength of literature circles in developing background knowledge--an acknowledged sticking point in the development of understanding for middle graders--with a special focus on the literature circle role of "investigator," where it is student initiative and not teacher direction that guides comprehension. Observing…

Current research has shown that comprehension can vary depending on text and question types and that readers' word recognition and background knowledge may account for these differences. Other reader characteristics such as semantic and syntactic awareness, inferencing, and planning or organizing all have also been linked to reading comprehension,…

Although evidence suggests that individual differences in reading and mathematics skills are correlated, this relationship has typically only been studied in relation to word decoding or global measures of reading. It is unclear whether mathematics is differentially related to word decoding and reading comprehension. In the current study, the…

In this article we present a detailed Dual Coding Theory (DCT) model of decoding. The DCT model reinterprets and subsumes The LaBerge and Samuels (1974) model of the reading process which has served well to account for decoding behaviors and the processes that underlie them. However, the LaBerge and Samuels model has had little to say about…

This study reports on the process of developing a test to assess students' reading comprehension of scientific materials and on the statistical results of the verification study. A combination of classic test theory and item response theory approaches was used to analyze the assessment data from a verification study. Data analysis indicates the…

This study examined the associations of three levels of meaning acquisition, i.e., whole word (vocabulary), morpheme (morphological awareness), and semantic radical (orthography-semantic awareness) to early Chinese reading comprehension among 164 Hong Kong Chinese primary school students, ages 7 and 8 years old, across 1 year. With time 1 word…

This article reports the observed behaviors and difficulties that 11 precalculus and calculus students exhibited in reading new passages from their mathematics textbooks. To gauge the "effectiveness" of these students' reading, we asked them to attempt straightforward mathematical tasks, based directly on what they had just read. The…

This study explored whether infants aged 12 months already recognize the communicative function of pointing gestures. Infants participated in a task requiring them to comprehend an adult's informative pointing gesture to the location of a hidden toy. They mostly succeeded in this task, which required them to infer that the adult was attempting to…

The present study examined the role of syntactic skills for reading comprehension in Chinese. Two hundred and seventy-two Chinese children were tested on their phonological processing, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and literacy skills at Grades 1 and 2. Hierarchical multiple regression results showed that syntactic skills, in terms of…

The benefits of drama have been reported extensively in educational research literature; however, few studies provide an in-depth analysis of how drama is used in early childhood classroom instruction for readers who struggle with comprehension. The focus of this study is: How do young children build literary understanding through drama? This…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing…