Research over the last 15 years has reported that for professional development to be effective, in terms of changing teachers' knowledge and/or instructional strategies, it needs to be conducted taking into consideration the following factors: teachers' existing knowledge, experience and attitudes towards the professional development, school…

This case study reports on critical consciousness development of a female school graduate in a reading comprehension course. Critical pedagogy (CP) principles were adopted in the course during which the participant was encouraged to read a set of passages critically and write critical journals. In addition, after reading each passage, she…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of imagination and learner-generated drawing on comprehension, reading time, cognitive load, and eye movements, and whether prior knowledge moderated the effects of these two strategies. Sixty-three undergraduate students participated in a pretest-posttest between-subjects study with the…

Reading engagement is like a puzzle consisting of many pieces to emplace for successful engagement to occur. The author, a French Immersion teacher/researcher, found that many of her grade one reluctant readers--those students who could read but chose not to--approached reading with some pieces of the puzzle. They had strategies and knowledge but…

This study reports on the development of an assessment to measure bilingual adolescents' knowledge of polysemous vocabulary and explores the contribution of polysemous word knowledge to reading comprehension among those students. Spanish-English bilingual students in seventh grade (n = 107) completed a battery of standardized reading and language…

Older student reading of informational texts like those found in most high school classrooms continue to be a concern. College entrance exams scores attest to the fact that this age group of readers remain largely unprepared for the rigorous, discipline area reading and comprehension demands of higher education. In response to this issue content…

This study aimed to examine the effects of different text difficulty levels on foreign language reading anxiety (FLRA) and reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. To this end, 50 elementary EFL learners were selected from two intact classes (n = 25 each). Each class was assigned to a text difficulty level (i.e.,…

This study explored the role and extent of the involvement of morphological awareness (MA) in contrast to rapid automatized naming (RAN) in word reading and comprehension of Arabic as a morphologically based orthography. We gave measures of word reading, reading comprehension, MA, and RAN in addition to a nonverbal mental ability test to 3 groups…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have recommended that students increase reading of expository texts in order to be successful in both the university setting and in the workplace. Yet, frequently, the demands of expository text involve prior knowledge that might be limited for students of low socioeconomic status (SES). In this study, we…

There is confusion among teachers in a school district in a southeastern state about the instructional use of the state-mandated Dominie assessment for word-level reading and phonemic awareness skills for kindergarten and first-grade students. Recent assessment data indicated that 20% of students tested in kindergarten and first grade needed…

This poster session will describe a study that took place at a university in the United Arab Emirates. The study included a reading app that was downloaded onto each student's individual mobile device. Students could read while listening to the stories. The primary goal of the study was to determine how, if at all, listening while reading in a…

The Crumpton School District (CSD) is a high performing school district in suburban Philadelphia that has expended a great deal of energy and work to close gaps in the achievement of its Black students. Despite these efforts, 2016 standardized test data reflect a reading achievement gap of 28 percentage points for Black boys attending four of the…

Approximately 20% of students experience reading failure each year. One of the difficulties associated with this large percentage is that it has been documented that pre-service teachers may not be receiving the most appropriate training regarding reading acquisition. The present study sought to determine if pre-service teachers were proficient in…

This study investigates the use of screening assessments within the increasingly popular Response to Intervention (RTI) framework, specifically seeking to collect concurrent validity evidence on one potential new screening tool, the Independent Reading Level Assessment (IRLA) framework. Furthermore, this study builds on existing literature by…

The purpose of this year-long project was to examine an instructional framework intended to help middle school teachers create instruction that responds to students' reading identities while also helping students learn the skills they need to be successful readers. The project used a formative design approach in order to achieve 3 pedagogical…