Adolescents with reading disability (RD) participated in a randomized controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of a multiple-component reading intervention with motivational components (PHAST). A ...total of 514 youth in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade formed instructional groups (4-8) that were randomly assigned to one of three conditions-one of two PHAST interventions (additional comprehension or fluency training) or a remedial reading control condition. Intervention occurred in participants' schools, 40-60 min daily, 3-5×/week, for 100-125 hr total. Over four outcome assessments, multilevel growth models evaluated intervention/control differences in growth over time, and post-intervention effect sizes. The two PHAST interventions were associated with equivalent positive outcomes, and their data combined. PHAST participants out-performed Control participants on 8 of 16 outcomes, demonstrating greater growth on standardized and experimental reading and spelling outcomes. PHAST-instructed students demonstrated higher sense of reading competence, and increased attributions of reading success to their own abilities. Intervention effect sizes (Hedge's g) comparing PHAST versus Control growth were larger for foundational reading skills (.78 for nonword decoding, .56 for word identification) than for reading comprehension (.36 for passage comprehension), for which effects were more equivocal. An effect size of .61 was obtained for sense of reading competence. A year later, the PHAST participants demonstrated continued improvement on later-developing reading skills like word reading efficiency, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Intensive reading intervention in middle school can produce gains on multiple dimensions of reading skill and motivation and foster continuing growth of higher-order reading skills.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Can reading intervention still make a positive impact for adolescents with persistent reading problems-those who failed to adequately respond to or never received early reading intervention? We developed and evaluated an intervention for middle school youth who were reading significantly below age and grade-level expectations and who met criteria for reading disability. We offered 100-125 hr of small group remedial intervention designed to address both the reading and the motivational problems of students with persistent reading disabilities in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. We compared the research-based PHAST Program with an equivalent amount of remedial reading instruction offered by Special Education teachers. These control group students made reading gains over the course of their intervention classes, but students in the PHAST intervention showed significantly greater improvement on standardized reading and spelling tests and on a self-report motivation measure of perceived reading competence. A year after their programs ended, PHAST students continued to improve on later-developing reading skills like word reading speed, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. These findings are encouraging because they demonstrate that multiple components of these older readers' reading systems still can be changed with intensive research-based intervention in the early years of adolescence.
Widely recognized by contemporaries as the most powerful theologian of his generation, Jean Gerson (1363-1429) dominated the stage of western Europe during a time of plague, fratricidal war, and ...religious schism. Yet modern scholarship has struggled to define Gerson's place in history, even as it searches for a compelling narrative to tell the story of his era. Daniel Hobbins argues for a new understanding of Gerson as a man of letters actively managing the publication of his works in a period of rapid expansion in written culture. More broadly, Hobbins casts Gerson as a mirror of the complex cultural and intellectual shifts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In contrast to earlier theologians, Gerson took a more humanist approach to reading and to authorship. He distributed his works, both Latin and French, to a more diverse medieval public. And he succeeded in reaching a truly international audience of readers within his lifetime. Through such efforts, Gerson effectively embodies the aspirations of a generation of writers and intellectuals. Removed from the narrow confines of late scholastic theology and placed into a broad interdisciplinary context, his writings open a window onto the fascinating landscape of fifteenth-century Europe. The picture of late medieval culture that emerges from this study is neither a specter of decaying scholasticism nor a triumphalist narrative of budding humanism and reform. Instead, Hobbins describes a period of creative and dynamic growth, when new attitudes toward writing and debate demanded and eventually produced new technologies of the written word.
In 1663, the Puritan missionary John Eliot, with the help of a Nipmuck convert whom the English called James Printer, produced the first Bible printed in North America. It was printed not in English ...but in Algonquian, making it one of the first books printed in a Native language. In this ambitious and multidisciplinary work, Phillip Round examines the relationship between Native Americans and printed books over a two-hundred-year period, uncovering the individual, communal, regional, and political contexts for Native peoples' use of the printed word. From the northeastern woodlands to the Great Plains, Round argues, alphabetic literacy and printed books mattered greatly in the emergent, transitional cultural formations of indigenous nations threatened by European imperialism.Removable Typeshowcases the varied ways that Native peoples produced and utilized printed texts over time, approaching them as both opportunity and threat. Surveying this rich history, Round addresses such issues as the role of white missionaries and Christian texts in the dissemination of print culture in Indian Country, the establishment of "national" publishing houses by tribes, the production and consumption of bilingual texts, the importance of copyright in establishing Native intellectual sovereignty (and the sometimes corrosive effects of reprinting thereon), and the significance of illustrations.
Background
Given the increasing popularity of reading from screens, it is not surprising that numerous studies have been conducted comparing reading from paper and electronic sources. The purpose of ...this systematic review and meta‐analysis is to consolidate the findings on reading performance, reading times and calibration of performance (metacognition) between reading text from paper compared to screens.
Methods
A systematic literature search of reports of studies comparing reading from paper and screens was conducted in seven databases. Additional studies were identified by contacting researchers who have published on the topic, by a backwards search of the references of found reports and by a snowball search of reports citing what was initially found. Only studies that were experiments with random assignment and with participants who had fundamental reading skills and disseminated between 2008 and 2018 were included. Twenty‐nine reports with 33 identified studies met inclusion criteria experimentally comparing reading performance (k = 33; n = 2,799), reading time (k = 14; n = 1,233) and/or calibration (k = 11; n = 698) from paper and screens.
Results
Based on random effects models, reading from screens had a negative effect on reading performance relative to paper (g = −.25). Based on moderator analyses, this may have been limited to expository texts (g = −.32) as there was no difference with narrative texts (g = −.04). The findings were similar when analysing literal and inferential reading performance separately (g = −.33 and g = −.26, respectively). No reliable differences were found for reading time (g = .08). Readers had better calibrated (more accurate) judgement of their performance from paper compared to screens (g = .20).
Conclusions
Readers may be more efficient and aware of their performance when reading from paper compared to screens.
Highlights
What is already known about this topic
Reading from screens is common.
Many concerns exist about effects of medium on reading.
Numerous studies on the topic have been conducted.
What this paper adds
Small benefit of paper on reading performance.
No difference in reading times.
Small benefit of paper on metacognition.
Implications for theory, policy or practice
Reading from paper may be more efficient.
Better understanding of why paper has reading benefits is needed.
The aim is to examine the impact of interventions on fluency and reading comprehension and how the effects of these interventions depend on the time that teachers spend with children with reading ...difficulties. Two groups were involved: an experimental group (n = 600) trained in code-related skills and a control group (n = 597) that received no intervention. In the Exp group, teachers adapted a specific instructional time for reading (SITR) in the light of children’s difficulties. A significant gain of .23 σ in fluency and a gain of .33 σ in reading comprehension were observed in favor of the Exp group, (a) but there was no gain in numeracy skills (as expected); (b) the amount of SITR is linked to children’s scores in literacy skills; (c) SITR is linked to progress in fluency and reading comprehension. These results argue in favor of differentiated reading instruction for children with difficulties during learning to read.
This research synthesis examines whether the association between print exposure and components of reading grows stronger across development. We meta-analyzed 99 studies (N = 7,669) that focused on ...leisure time reading of (a) preschoolers and kindergartners, (b) children attending Grades 1-12, and (c) college and university students. For all measures in the outcome domains of reading comprehension and technical reading and spelling, moderate to strong correlations with print exposure were found. The outcomes support an upward spiral of causality: Children who are more proficient in comprehension and technical reading and spelling skills read more; because of more print exposure, their comprehension and technical reading and spelling skills improved more with each year of education. For example, in preschool and kindergarten print exposure explained 12% of the variance in oral language skills, in primary school 13%, in middle school 19%, in high school 30%, and in college and university 34%. Moderate associations of print exposure with academic achievement indicate that frequent readers are more successful students. Interestingly, poor readers also appear to benefit from independent leisure time reading. We conclude that shared book reading to preconventional readers may be part of a continuum of out-of-school reading experiences that facilitate children's language, reading, and spelling achievement throughout their development.
Brain Words Gentry, J. Richard; Ouellette, Gene P.
Stenhouse Publishers,
2019, 2019-02-00, 2023-10-10
eBook, Book
The past two decades have brought giant leaps in our understanding of how the brain works. But these discoveries-and all their exciting implications-have yet to make their way into most classrooms.
...In
Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching
, authors J. Richard Gentry and Gene Ouellette, bring their original, research-based framework of "brain words"-dictionaries in the brain where students store and automatically access sounds, spellings, and meaning. This book aims to fill the gap between the science of reading and classroom instruction by providing up-to-date knowledge about reading and neurological circuitry, including evidence that spelling is at the core of the reading brain.
Brain Words
will show how children's brains develop as they become readers and discover ways you can take concrete steps to promote this critical developmental passage, including:
Incorporating tools to recognize what works, what doesn't, and why
Practical classroom activities for daily teaching and student assessment
Insights about what brain research tells us about whole language and phonics-first movements
Deepened understanding of dyslexia through the enhanced lens of brain science
With the insights and strategies of
Brain Words
, you can meet your students where they are and ensure they gain confidence as readers, spellers, and writers.
Writers, Readers, and Reputations explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged. Writers were promoted as celebrities, advertising both products and themselves. Philip ...Waller's detailed and entertaining study is a collective biography of literary figures, some forgotten, some enduring, over half a century.
The ability to read in a second language (L2) for academic purposes is essential for higher education students. Dutch colleges increasingly use materials in English or teach in English. This can be ...challenging for L2 readers, especially students entering higher education from vocational studies, who may have less experience with L2 academic reading. Teaching L2 reading programmes containing explicit instruction of reading strategies may benefit higher education students in L2 academic reading, particularly since reading strategies learned in the first language (L1) may not transfer to the L2. In this 7-week L2 reading strategy intervention, 801 first-year polytechnic students learned to use seven reading strategies that were effective according to a meta-analysis of L2 reading strategy studies. Data regarding students reading skills were collected over one academic year, from three treatment waves, using a regression discontinuity design. Three tests of equal difficulty were given to participants. In each wave students completed reading tests several weeks before the intervention, at the beginning and directly after the intervention. Results show that in all three waves the improvement in reading comprehension scores between the second and third measurement (due to the experimental course) significantly exceeded the increase between the first two measurement occasions. Although the intervention was shown to be effective, the effects were to some extent mediated by the previous education level. This study supports the explicit instruction of strategies in L2 reading for students in higher education and welcomes more research into L2 reading strategy interventions for students from vocational backgrounds.
By fourth or fifth grade, many striving readers have lost their self-confidence and the belief that, with hard work, they can reach a goal. Whether these students were on a computer reading program, ...in a grade-level basal program, or listening to a required novel, they weren't reading. Research by Allington, Krashen, Howard, Miller, and Ripp points to the need for students to read wonderful books to develop reading skill and expertise. Voluminous reading is an intervention. This book will suggest ways to organize instruction so students in ELA classes and across the curriculum read voluminously every day. It will explain that there is no program that is the magic bullet for creating schools full of readers. The magic bullet is having skilled teachers who are ongoing learners and class libraries in all subjects, book rooms for storing instructional genre units, and alternate texts on topics studied in content subjects.
PDF
