This investigation extended the use of the priming methodology to 5- and 6-year-olds at the beginning stages of learning English as a second language (L2). In Study 1, 14 L2 children described transitive scenes without an experimenter's input. They produced no passives and minimal actives; most of their utterances were incomplete. In Study 2, 56…

Standardized measures are often used as an index of students' reading comprehension and scores have important implications, particularly for students who perform below expectations. This study examined secondary-level students' patterns of responding and the prevalence and impact of non-attempted items on a timed, group-administered,…

The Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework was developed by WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) two decades ago to help teachers provide the literacy support students need to be successful readers in the content areas. It has since reached over 100,000 teachers in schools across the country, at the middle school, high school, and…

In Florida, mean proficiency scores are reported on the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT) as well as recommended learning gains from the developmental scale score. Florida now has another within-year measure of growth in reading comprehension from the Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR). The FAIR reading comprehension…

This study examined whether morphological analysis may be a mechanism underlying the relationship of morphological awareness to vocabulary and comprehension. Eighty-eight fifth- and 74 eighth-grade students completed a task designed to assess whether students use morphological analysis to infer meanings of low-frequency, presumably unfamiliar,…

Recently, support has grown for using comic books and graphic novels to enhance and support literacy instruction. In some ways, it's surprising that the medium has only recently enjoyed such support. Stereotyped views of comics as unsophisticated, disposable entertainment or material written to the lowest common denominator fail to consider the…

We report the results of an fMRI investigation of the neural bases of written language comprehension (reading) and production (spelling). Both tasks were examined in the same individuals, allowing greater precision in establishing the relationship between the neural underpinnings of these two cognitive functions. Also examined was the relationship…

In this study, our goal was to identify unique clusters of Adolescent Struggling Readers (ASRs) and examine the reading skill profiles each cluster presented. We assessed 319 students attending urban schools on three standardized measures of reading comprehension and eight standardized measures of component skills, including vocabulary, listening…

This article presents the views of 24 nationally recognized authorities in the field of mathematics, and in particular the calculus, on student understanding of the first-year calculus. A framework emerged that includes four overarching end goals for understanding of the first-year calculus: (a) mastery of the fundamental concepts and-or skills of…

Human action takes place under multiple pressures: limited time, patchy understanding and pre-existing commitments to important stakes. Understanding better how intelligent individual action and social order arise in these conditions was a lifelong focus for both Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Weick, articulators, respectively, of the concepts of…

Purpose: To evaluate potential contributions of broadband spectral integration in the perception of static vowels. Specifically, can the auditory system infer formant frequency information from changes in the intensity weighting across harmonics when the formant itself is missing? Does this type of integration produce the same results in the lower…

This narrative synthesis reviews the psychometric properties of commercially and publicly available retell instruments used to assess the reading comprehension of students in grades K-12. Eleven instruments met selection criteria and were systematically coded for data related to the administration procedures, scoring procedures, and technical…

We explore whether time shifts in text comprehension are represented spatially. Participants read sentences involving past or future events and made sensibility judgment responses in one of two ways: (1) moving toward or away from their body and (2) pressing the toward or away buttons without moving. Previous work suggests that spatial…

The challenges of understanding how reading abilities vary within the classroom can be daunting. This article offers techniques to organize a variety of assessment data to give teachers a clear picture of individual achievement, how students compare with one another, and how reliably various assessment instruments yield an accurate picture of…

Oral reading fluency is frequently used in school settings to assess student reading skills, but it is somewhat commonly believed that some students can read words fluently while not comprehending (i.e., word callers). Previous studies examining the prevalence of word callers typically included native English speakers rather than English learners…