Curriculum Based Measurement (CBM) has become an increasingly popular instrument/methodology for reading assessment. In part, its popularity derives from promises of formative assessment (i.e., progress monitoring). However, a review of the literature suggests CBM formative assessment applications may lack the requisite reliability evidence. Furthermore, available research provides support and direction to improve the accuracy and stability of formative assessment outcomes. The primary purpose of this research was to evaluate and compare the effects of a controlled set of reading passages on student performance. Researchers developed a controlled set of Curriculum Like Measurement (CLM) reading passages from a sample of unfamiliar grade-specific reading curriculums. Each grade-specific passage-set was controlled for passage-difficulty using the Spache and Dale-Chall readability formulas. Analysis compared CBM and CLM formative assessment outcomes. A second purpose of this study was to compare short-term (10-week) assessment outcomes with the negatively accelerating developmental trends that have been documented with long-term assessment (i.e., 36-week). Analysis tested for differences in stability of growth-estimates [SE(b)], accuracy of predictions (SEE), and observed growth-rates/slope (b). 99 students in grades second to fifth participated over 10 weeks. Results suggest CLM progress monitoring outcomes are more stable and accurate than CBM. Results did not demonstrate the negatively accelerating curvilinear relationship between grades. Results and implications are discussed.

“Why are the students at the College of Micronesia having problems understanding their academic texts and materials?” That is the question that this study explores through extensive interviews with professors and students, and more than 400 reading proficiency tests. This study finds that Micronesian students have difficulties with several aspects of reading, and that there are a multitude of factors that contribute to the problem. Those factors fall into the following areas: language, educational background, culture, motivation, learning and reading strategies of the students; and the teaching methodologies, institutional policies and sociopolitical conditions of the school. The study concludes by recommending to the faculty to directly teach metacognitive reading strategies in all areas of instruction, to adapt the content, language and level of the materials to the educational and cultural characteristics of the students, and to adapt methodologies to the Micronesian learning style. The new role of college instructors should not be to impart a list of foreign facts, but to serve as a bridge between the culture and academic background of the students and the culture and content of their textbooks. Seen from this perspective reading for Micronesians will become an active interaction between their world and the world of the writer, and no longer an oppressive memorization of meaningless facts.

This study problematizes the literacy practices in a fourth grade suburban classroom. Drawing on sociocultural and poststructural theories of language and literacy, this study examines the teacher-student interactions and student-student interactions within classroom literacy events. This study argues for the need for progressive pedagogy as it examines how the very practices that are implemented to support student difference also serve to marginalize opportunities for student participation within the dominant discourses that shape the classroom culture. Using Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 1995), this study examines the interactions through moment-by-moment analysis of critical moments and contrastive cases to gain perspective on how students' literacy identities were constructed in this classroom. The use of critical discourse analysis helped to make visible both the dominant discourses that were operating in the classroom and how they contributed to the shaping of student literacy identities. The use of critical moments as a unit of analysis in this study arose from the tensions that occurred within the analysis of many literacy events, between the teachers and 3 focal students that were considered to be struggling literacy learners within the classroom. The critical moments also highlighted the tensions that occurred between the students and the dominant discourses of educational reform and differentiated instruction as they were enacted through literacy practices and teacher-student interactions. This tension, enacted as resistance, positioned the students as agentic in the construction of their own literacy identities rather than subject to the teacher's construction of them as struggling literacy learners and also made visible how the students contributed to the knowledge of what counted as literacy in this culture. Major themes stood out as the critical moments were cross-viewed, which revealed the issues of authority, agency, choice, competition, and differentiated instruction as major constructs within and across the interactions. This study demonstrates how students' resistance to the discourses disrupted the ideologies, particularly within the discourse of differentiated instruction as students agentically constructed their literacy identities in opposition to what counted as literacy.

In recent years there has been increasing attention to the field of family literacy. A number of qualitative and ethnographic studies (Taylor, 1982; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988, Paratore, 1999, 2001 Auerbach E. R., 1989, 1995; Rogers, 2002) have documented the importance of the family in the acquisition of literacy within the context of the home. These two case studies of Denise and Shrieffe address the question of whether and how parents who are introduced to reading strategies in a family literacy program use these strategies in their own home when they read with their children. The use of a qualitative paradigm (Teale, 1986) enabled me, as a family literacy teacher-researcher, to document the home teaching by these two parents and to generate broad questions that would help describe these reading interactions. This study suggests several conclusions. First, a reading intervention designed by a family literacy teacher for parents who are enrolled in a family literacy program needs to take into consideration a parent's personal literacy needs as well as any fabricated literacy support strategies a parent displays when interacting with his/her children while reading. Second, parents not only adopted the reading strategies to use as they read with children at home, but also adapted the strategies, changing them to better meet their own child's literacy needs and stage of literacy development. Third, parents transformed themselves from silent observers of their children's literacy learning to active participants in it, reading with their children and offering them reading support. Fourth, school-based literacy instruction transferred from the school to the homes of the families by the family literacy teacher-researcher, added new understandings to the home literacy environments of both families. Lastly, the role of teacher-researcher required me to attempt to understand complex questions about the intersections of reading and families' lives by using rich qualitative methods of analysis. This study contributes to a further understanding of family literacy reading as a way to help shape parent/child literacy interactions and ultimately, the parent and child's literacy learning. This study also has implications for curriculum design in family literacy programs in the United States. That is, to advocate for a family literacy teacher expanding her role to include responsibilities of modeling literacy strategies and skills in the homes of the parents and children as well as introducing children's literature and other learning materials.

Current policy statements concerning adult literacy in Guatemala state that Mayan women need literacy skills in order to better themselves and their families socially and economically and need to possess these tools and skills in order to participate in the emerging civil society. Responding to this rhetoric, and a chance to win funding, organizations that design and develop literacy programming have responded with adult literacy “classes” that focus on a single model of literacy learning for women that tends to be equated to a school model of basic education. Central to this single model for literacy learning, is a single conception of literacy, as a unified, quantifiable easily attainable goal. This reductionist tendency in Guatemala has led to focusing on a single literacy as the solution to the problem of indigenous women's illiteracy. Assumptions about the needs and desires of beneficiaries are made by literacy experts and planners without taking the time to understand the literacy practices that Mayan women and communities are already engaged in. Examining and analyzing the literacy and numeracy practices women are already engaged in is a very different approach to program planning than the hegemonic centralism of the more traditional autonomous model. By using ethnographic methods to conduct literacy research, a potentially empowering model for literacy programming can emerge that is sensitive to local context and needs. The following guidelines resulted from this study: It cannot be assumed (1) that programs designed for literacy acquisition are in the best educational or social interests of the target audience; (2) that “best practices” of teaching and learning developed and advocated by Western educators and planners are the most effective and successful in all contexts. Whole language approaches or learner-generated materials may work in some contexts and not in others and we cannot simply impose “state of the art” approaches in all contexts and expect them to work well. Any sustainable, meaningful literacy intervention in Guatemala would best be conceptualized as a long-term process that helps to establish an intergenerational network of communicative relationships that focus on the social, cultural, economic and linguistic processes of communities.

Children with communication disorders are often at risk of literacy difficulties, especially students that present with autism and/or speech sound disorders. This quasi-experimental study was designed to examine the effects of a 10-week "hybrid" intervention for preschool students with and without communication disorders in an integrated classroom. The classroom intervention targets both vocabulary and phonological awareness, two critical components of literacy that are strongly correlated with one another. The objectives of this study were (1) to provide empirical evidence that classroom-based pre-literacy intervention can be effective for students with communication disabilities, allowing for more time with their peers in a potentially least-restrictive environment and (2) to demonstrate that typically-developing preschool children also benefit from classroom-based pre-literacy training.

Based on the constructionist theory, reading is viewed as a meaning-constructing process where the reader interacts with the text by simultaneously using information from a variety of sources to construct a multi-level representation of the text. These sources include the text, one's background knowledge of the content and about the world, and the pragmatic context of the message such as the author, reader, setting, and the purpose of the exchange. The resulting representations have become known as situation models. To construct a coherent situation model, the reader needs to develop a strong textbase, as well as to integrate the information he/she reads with information stored in his/her memory while monitoring the comprehension process closely so as to achieve comprehension. This study is designed to investigate how readers of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) construct situation models under four conditions: topic familiar/language easy, topic familiar/language difficult, topic unfamiliar/language easy, topic unfamiliar/language difficult. Forty CFL readers at the third-year level served as the subjects of this study. They were randomly assigned to read in one of the conditions. They read one passage in Chinese, stopped periodically during reading to report their thoughts, and afterwards wrote down everything they remembered without referring back to the passage. The reading sessions were tape recorded, transcribed, and coded for analysis. Recall protocols were also scored as measurements of their reading performance. Results showed that while the on-line reading activities were mostly restricted to local level processing, a characteristic predicted by the linguistic threshold theory, the recall protocols showed a facilitative effect of topic familiarity, corroborating with earlier findings from both first (L1) and second (L2) language reading research studies adopting the schema theory. Based on the findings, future research is identified and teaching implications are also recommended.

This study examined the effects of a parent-delivered direct instruction reading program, on the early literacy skills of first graders at risk for reading problems. Participants were children from low SES backgrounds in a rural school district and were considered at risk for reading problems. The children's parents were taught to use the reading curriculum and asked to deliver 100 twenty-minute daily lessons. A time series multiple baseline across participants design, using fluency measures of phonemic awareness and reading as dependent measures, showed that the children who completed the program made strong gains in their reading skills. Parents indicated that they were well able to implement the program, and found it to be acceptable for use with their children.

Four experiments investigated how verb-specific lexical information is used in resolving the noun phrase complement/tensed sentence complement ambiguity, extending prior research (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; Holmes, Stowe, & Cupples, 1989; Trueswell, Tannenhaus, & Kello, 1993). Predictions from the Constraint Satisfaction Approach (MacDonald, 1994; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994a; 1994b; Tannenhaus & Trueswell, 1994; Trueswell, Tannenhaus, & Kello, 1993) and the Lexical Filtering Proposal (Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991; Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; 1991; Frazier, 1987; Frazier & Clifton, 1989) were contrasted. The former approach assumes that lexical information is used to guide the analysis of syntactically ambiguous phrases, predicting that comparable effects of verb bias should be observed for ambiguous versus unambiguous tensed sentence complements as for sentences containing temporarily ambiguous noun phrase complements and for sentences containing unambiguous tensed sentence complements. The latter proposal, an extension of the Garden Path Model (Frazier, 1978; Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Frazier, & Rayner, 1982), assumes that lexical information may be used when it becomes available; however, the analysis of syntactically ambiguous phrases is not delayed until lexical information becomes available, but instead is made in accordance with the syntactic parsing principles Minimal Attachment and Late Closure. Therefore, larger effects of verb bias are predicted for ambiguous versus unambiguous tensed sentence complements than for sentences containing temporarily ambiguous noun phrase complements or for sentences containing unambiguous tensed sentence complements. In Experiments 1-3, two self-paced reading methods (phrase by phrase and word by word presentation) and eye tracking were used to compare reading time on sentences containing ambiguous and unambiguous tensed sentence complements, containing either short or long ambiguous noun phrases, preceded by either NP-biased verbs, i.e., verbs generally occurring most frequently with noun phrase complements, or S-biased verbs, i.e., verbs generally occurring most frequently with tensed sentence complements. In Experiment 4, eye tracking was used to compare reading time on sentences containing temporarily ambiguous tensed sentence complements, temporarily ambiguous noun phrase complements, and unambiguous tensed sentence complements, containing either short or long ambiguous noun phrases, preceded by either NP-biased or S-biased verbs. Results from these four experiments are most compatible with the Lexical Filtering Proposal. Implications for models of human sentence processing are discussed.

No description available.