The advancements of technology have led to the use of electronic reading systems for digital text. Research indicates similarities and differences in reading performance and comprehension in digital formats compared to paper formats. This study compared vocabulary understanding and reading comprehension scores from two reading sources (electronic…

Reviews of the research on literacy for students with moderate intellectual disability indicated that sight-word instruction continues to be their primary mode of reading instruction. Reported in this article are data supporting the Sight-Word Component of the larger Integrated Literacy Curriculum for Students with Moderate to Severe Intellectual…

This investigation extends the study of the reading comprehension practices used with students with learning disabilities (LD) via a case study, exploring the beliefs and practices in reading comprehension of "Wendy," a cross-categorical special educator nominated as effective in her work with sixth-grade students. Wendy's practices serve as a…

For 2 years we followed lower-performing English learner (EL) and native English speaking (non-EL) students who participated in an efficacy trial of a supplemental first-grade code-oriented intervention implemented by paraeducators. At the end of grade three, across all students (n = 180 of the original 187 students), treatment effects were…

Changing the order of items between alternate test forms to prevent copying and to enhance test security is a common practice in achievement testing. However, these changes in item order may affect item and test characteristics. Several procedures have been proposed for studying these item-order effects. The present study explores the use of…

This study evaluates the efficacy of the Lexia Reading (LR) programme with a cohort of 37 students in a Decile 1 primary school. The students were randomly assigned to experimental (who used LR) and control groups (who did not use LR). The WIAT-II was used to provide pre and post measures of literacy skills. Results indicated that students who…

This study tested the theory that future poor comprehenders would show modest but pervasive deficits in both language comprehension and production during early childhood as compared with future poor decoders and typical readers. Using an existing database (NICHD ECCRN), fifth-grade students were identified as having poor comprehension skills…

This study investigated the multiple roles of morphological awareness in reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority (LM) learners and their native English-speaking (NE) peers. Sixth-grade students (N = 137; 82 LM, 55 NE) were assessed on English measures of derivational morphological awareness, morphologically complex academic…

Purpose: The main goal of this study was to examine whether the morphological structure of a child's first language determined the strength of association between morphological awareness and reading and spelling skills in English, their second language. Methods: The sample consisted of 888 Grade six students who had English as their first language…

In this article, we describe our research involving the administration of the Critical Reading Inventory-2 (CRI-2), an informal reading inventory that places special emphasis on thoughtful response to text and higher level thinking. We administered the CRI-2 to a group of students to obtain diagnostic data for guiding instruction. The data for…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between reading comprehension scores and conceptual mathematics scores of third grade students at a selected elementary school. The sample consisted of 27 students of which 15 were females and 12 were males. Data were collected using a teacher made conceptual math exam and the scores from…

Descriptive analyses: Approximately one-third of the nearly 7,500 utterances spoken by teachers were comments. Differences in the use of instructional strategies and content emerged in relation to curriculum condition. In contrast to the variability between teachers, little within-teacher variability was observed. On average, teachers used only…

Research over the last several decades has revealed that adolescents in the United States are leaving school with insufficient literacy skills to compete in the global marketplace. A primary contributor to poor literacy rates is poor reading comprehension. The purpose of this research was to develop and test the efficacy of a protocol for teaching…

Schools in the United States have been using the Accelerated Reader (AR) program since the mid-1980s. A search of the literature related to the effectiveness of the AR program revealed that many of the studies were conducted more than a decade ago, and a large number of those studies failed to utilize a control group to provide comparative data.…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…