This paper examines the performance of the eight major occupational categories across the four skill areas of the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey. The results indicated that some 38-64% of employed Australians were below minimal competence (at Level 1 or Level 2) in one of the four skill areas of prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy…

Behaviorally-designed educational programs are often based on a research tradition that is not widely understood by potential users of the programs. Though the data may be sound and the prediction of outcomes for individual learners quite good, those advocating adoption of behaviorally-designed educational programs may need to do more in order to…

Building on the principles of philosophical hermeneutics, Ricoeur (1984) used the concept of narrative to explain how individuals interpret their experiences and make sense of seemingly disconnected elements of life by turning them into the stories. Narrative identities represent the coming together of the stories individuals tell, as well as…

Introduction: Accountability and diagnostic assessments usually comprise several subtests to provide information on the different components of the abilities tested. For practicality reasons such subtests are usually short. The major drawback of short subtests is their low reliability and imprecision. This study shows how a compensatory…

A sample of 170 Italian children was assessed for reading accuracy, reading speed, text comprehension and spelling in Grades 1 and 3 in order to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal relationships among literacy skills. Main results from multivariate analyses (regression, discriminant and path analyses) indicated that reading speed was the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether hyphens that disambiguate phrasing in ambiguous sentences influence reading rate and reading comprehension for younger and older adults. Moreover, as working memory (WM) has been implicated in age-related changes in sentence comprehension for both auditory and written materials, we asked if it…

In the present study 24 university students read four different texts in four conditions: (1) while listening to music they preferred to listen to while studying; (2) while listening to music they did not prefer to listen to while studying; (3) while listening to a recording of noise from a cafe; and finally (4) in silence. After each text they…

This study examined the relations between reading fluency and comprehension among elementary school students (N = 171) in Grades 2, 3, and 5, all of whom were designated as English language learners (ELL) at some point in their educational careers. Although the overall relation between reading fluency and comprehension (r = 0.56) was consistent…

Students' experiences and perceptions of good teaching and understanding in literature and physics during one school year were investigated through in-depth interviews with students in eight Greek high school classes in the first, second and third grade. The pedagogical quality of in-depth teaching and understanding of subject matter, as described…

The present study examines how sixth grade students' discussions about texts and comprehension strategies looked similar and/or different based on their identities as readers and their reading levels. Findings indicated that students who self-identified as high-performing readers talked about texts and strategies in ways that were different from…

Students with English as second language (ESL) are typically behind monolingual peers in reading comprehension even when phonemic awareness skills, phonics and word recognition are at grade level. The lack of syntactic awareness is one of the reasons cited in multiple studies (August & Shanahan, 2010; Da Fountoura & Siegel, 1995; Lesaux…

Despite recent research indicating that students require explicit teaching in the key reading skill of comprehension in order to become successful readers, a significant gap in the research relates to teacher professional development (PD) in the area. A recent Irish study used gathered survey data to create a year-long PD programme for teachers in…

Purpose: The authors assessed adult selective auditory attention to determine effects of (a) differences between the vocal/speaking characteristics of different mixed-gender pairs of masking talkers and (b) the rhythmic structure of the language of the competing speech. Method: Reception thresholds for English sentences were measured for 50…

In this study, word knowledge and its relation to text comprehension was examined with 50 Chinese- and 20 Korean-speaking second language (L2) learners and 40 first language (L1) speakers of Japanese. Breadth and depth of word knowledge were assessed by a word-definition matching test and a word-associates selection test, respectively. Text…

The purpose of this narrative synthesis is to determine the reliability and validity of retell protocols for assessing reading comprehension of students in grades K-12. Fifty-four studies were systematically coded for data related to the administration protocol, scoring procedures, and technical adequacy of the retell component. Retell was…