This study examines whether unfamiliar proper names affect English as a second language (ESL) learners' listening comprehension. A total of 110 intermediate to advanced ESL learners participated; comprehension of a short news text was tested under two conditions, Names Known (all proper names pre-taught in advance) and Names Unknown (all proper…

Data-based decision making by teams is central to implementation of response to intervention (RTI) models. Few studies have examined the actual decision-making process within RTI systems of service delivery. The purpose of this study was to examine the tier assignment decisions for students across grade-level teams in three K-5 elementary schools…

This paper reports the follow-up of a randomised control trial study of the ABRACADABRA web-based literacy intervention that contrasted synthetic versus analytic phonics (Comaskey, Savage & Abrami, 2009) in kindergarten children from urban low-SES backgrounds. Participants who received a "synthetic" phonics+phoneme awareness training (n = 26) or…

According to the Matthew effect model, interindividual differences in reading competence between poor and normal readers should become wider as students grow older. The second part of the model assumes that these differential pathways are mainly attributable to differential reading activities. The purpose of this study is to examine whether both…

Research in student knowledge and learning of science has typically focused on explaining conceptual change. Recent research, however, documents the great degree to which student thinking is dynamic and context-sensitive, implicitly calling for explanations not only of change but also of stability. In other words, when a pattern of student…

Recent research has demonstrated that slight increases of inter-letter spacing have a positive impact on skilled readers' recognition of visually presented words. In the present study, we examined whether this effect generalises to young normal readers and readers with developmental dyslexia, and whether increased inter-letter spacing affects the…

The present study examined narrative development in children and adolescents with Down syndrome longitudinally. Narratives were collected from 32 children and adolescents with Down syndrome three times over a 1-year period. Both micro- and macrolevel analyses were conducted. Significant growth over the 1-year period was seen in semantic complexity…

Children with a clinical description of cerebral palsy (CP) commonly experience cognitive and sensory difficulties that co-occur with motor impairment, and for some children this can include impairments in social communication. While research has begun to examine theory of mind abilities in children with CP, relatively little is known about social…

Child care studies that have examined links between teachers' qualifications and children's outcomes often ignore teachers' and children's transitions between classrooms at a center throughout the day and only take into account head teacher qualifications. The objective of this investigation was to examine these traditional assumptions and to…

The present study utilized a latent variable modeling approach to examine the Simple View of Reading in a sample of students from 3rd, 7th, and 10th grades (N = 215, 188, and 180, respectively). Latent interaction modeling and other latent variable models were employed to investigate (a) the functional form of the relationship between decoding and…

The purpose of this study was to compare the word processing and reading comprehension skilled in and less skilled readers. Forty-nine, 2nd graders (26 skilled and 23 less skilled readers) participated in this study. They were tested with two experiments assessing their processing of isolated real word and pseudoword pairs as well as their reading…

This article is concerned with how computer science, and more exactly computational complexity theory, can inform cognitive science. In particular, we suggest factors to be taken into account when investigating how people deal with computational hardness. This discussion will address the two upper levels of Marr's Level Theory: the computational…

This paper examines how teachers and administrators who were involved in a multi-year effort to engage in distributed leadership interpreted their experiences. We lay out and apply an argument for using an interpretive perspective to study distributed leadership. Collective sensemaking around distributed leadership is illustrated by an in-depth…

This study taught the passive to two children with specific language impairment (aged 8;1 and 8;2). It employed usage-based principles including "constructional grounding"; using short structures as the basis for acquiring long structures, and "construction conspiracy"; encouraging analogies between partially overlapping…

This study examined the technical adequacy of vocabulary-matching curriculum-based measurement (CBM) to identify and monitor the progress of 148 middle school students in social studies. In addition, the effectiveness of a reading comprehension intervention, Collaborative Strategic Reading (Klingner, Vaughn, Dimino, Schumm, & Bryant, 2001),…