Anne E Cunningham

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Graduate School of Education

This study examines the influence of a parent workshop intervention on vocabulary acquisition of at-risk preschool children during parent-child shared storybook reading. Sixty-nine parents were randomly assigned to either treatment or control group. In the treatment condition, parents were taught to implement elaborated vocabulary instruction (defi...

Many words in English resemble one another in multiple ways. Words with similar spellings are referred to as orthographic neighbors. The purpose of this within‐subject experimental study was to examine the effect of orthographic neighbors on the spelling acquisition of second‐grade students. In each of five sessions of a computer‐based experiment,...

Findings from education to neuroscience highlight the role of young children’s print-related skills, including early writing, in predicting and enhancing the development of their later literacy abilities. However, the field lacks standardized, comprehensive measures with relatively brief scoring systems that can capture the progression from scribbl...

The goal of this study was to test the item-based assumption of the self-teaching hypothesis by reanalyzing Cunningham’s (2006) data. In Cunningham’s study, 37 first graders participated in a self-teaching experiment, and their orthographic learning was measured by a spelling task and an orthographic choice task. A 2-level logistic regression model...

Cunningham, A.E., & Ryan O’Donnell, C. (2015). Teacher Knowledge in Early Literacy. In Alexander Pollatsek & Rebecca Treiman (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Reading. (pp. 447-462). New York: Oxford University Press.

Writing is one of humankind’s greatest inventions, and modern societies could not function if their citizens could not read and write. How do skilled readers so quickly pick up meaning from squiggles on a page, and how do children learn to do so? These questions have been studied in fields ranging from vision science to cognitive psychology to educ...

This chapter focuses on the body of disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge required to provide high-quality beginning reading instruction to young children. The chapter examines quality literacy instruction from a historical perspective, reviews what science tells us about the successful teaching of reading, explores why teachers are not consistent...

It is well known that the home environment is a major factor in a child's literacy development. Exactly how different home-environmental factors play out across different national contexts is not as well understood. Using data from the 2011 Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS), we tested for structural invariance in the rela...

This chapter traces the evolution of learning design at LeapFrog Enterprises, a California-based toy company, from standalone products to an online/offline-learning ecosystem. Toys are the original mobile learning technology for children. They have long been used as carry-along props that engage children in a range of cognitive, social, emotional,...

As teacher quality becomes a central issue in discussions of children's literacy, both researchers and policy makers alike express increasing concern with how teachers structure and allocate their lesson time for literacy-related activities as well as with what they know about reading development, processes, and pedagogy. The authors examined the b...

A growing body of research is emerging that investigates the teacher knowledge base essential for supporting reading and writing development at the elementary school level. However, even though increasing recognition is given to the pivotal role that preschool teachers play in cultivating children’s early literacy development, considerably fewer st...

In this chapter, we trace the evolution of learning design at LeapFrog Enterprises , a California-based toy company, from standalone products to an online/ offline learning ecosystem. The first section of the chapter describes several key products in terms of three foundational learning design principles: engaging children, enhancing play patterns...

En este artículo se reseñan los resultados de una serie de investiga- ciones destinadas a explorar el papel que desempeña la "cantidad de lectura" en el desarrollo de las estructuras cognitivas de los estudian- tes. Se concluye que muchas de las brechas cognitivas observadas

Share's "self-teaching" model proposes that readers acquire most knowledge about the orthographic structure of words incidentally while reading independently. In the current study, the self-teaching hypothesis was tested by simulating everyday reading through the use of real words, analyzing the effects of context, and considering the independent c...

Recently, investigators have begun to pay increasing attention to the role of teachers' domain specific knowledge in the area of reading, and its implications for both classroom practice and student learning. The aims of the present study were to assess kindergarten to third-grade teachers' actual and perceived reading-related subject matter knowle...

Discusses research that supports proposition that the more children read the greater their vocabulary growth and cognitive skills. Offers several suggestions for how principals can promote more independent reading during and after school. (Contains 2 tables and 14 references.) (PKP)

Thirty-four second grade children read target homophonic pseudowords (e.g., slurst/slirst) in the context of real stories in a test of the self-teaching theory of early reading acquisition. The degree of orthographic learning was assessed with three converging tasks: homophonic choice, spelling, and target naming. Each of the tasks indicated that o...

We investigated relationships among elementary teachers’ reading-related content knowledge (knowledge of literature and phonology), their philosophical orientation toward reading instruction, their classroom practice, and their students’ learning. Correlations showed little relationship between instructional philosophy and content knowledge, and li...

Six different measures of orthographic processing (three different letter string choice tasks, two orthographic choice tasks, and a homophone choice task) were administered to thirty-nine children who had also been administered the word recognition subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test and a comprehensive battery of tasks assessing phonologi...

Stanovich, Cunningham, and West examine how literacy proficiency varies as a function of the amount of reading that people do. Many studies have investigated the antecedents of literacy, for example, instructional approaches and family variables, that lead to differences among people in reading achievement. Few have investigated the consequences of...

EADING HAS cognitive consequences that extend beyond its immediate task of lifting meaning from a particular passage. Furthermore, these consequences are reciprocal and exponential in nature. Accumulated over time—spiraling either upward or downward— they carry profound implications for the development of a wide range of cognitive capabilities. Con...

A group of 1st-graders who were administered a battery of reading tasks in a previous study were followed up as 11th graders. Ten years later, they were administered measures of exposure to print, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and general knowledge. First-grade reading ability was a strong predictor of all of the 11th-grade outcomes and remain...

First-grade children completed a battery of tasks that included standardized measures of word recognition and spelling, measures of phonological and orthographic processing skill, and a short indicator of exposure to print via home literacy experiences. Phonological and orthographic processing skill were separable components of variance in word rec...

In a study of 268 college students, measures of exposure to print predicted individual differences in knowledge in a variety of domains even after individual differences on 4 indicators of general ability (high school GPA, Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices, Nelson-Denny Reading Test—Comprehension subtest, and a mathematics ability test) had been...

Early childhood education (ECE) is probably more vulnerable than any other educational sector to the winds of economic, political, and social change. This is largely due to the lack of a stable and universally agreed upon curriculum core, and because the inputs to the system, namely young children themselves, typically have not received formalized...

Most studies of the cognitive consequences of literacy have attempted to compare the performance of literate individuals with that of illiterate individuals. We argue that it is not absolutely necessary to examine illiterates in order to study the cognitive consequences of reading experience because there is enormous variation in exposure to print...

This study assessed the construct validity of a recently introduced measure of children's exposure to print, the Title Recognition Test (TRT). In samples of 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-grade children, the TRT demonstrated significant correlations with spelling, vocabulary, verbal fluency, word knowledge, and general information. Most important, it accounte...

Kindergarten and first-grade children received two forms of instruction in phonemic awareness: (1) a “skill and drill” approach where the procedural knowledge of segmentation and blending of phonemes were taught versus (2) a “metalevel” approach that explicitly emphasized the application, value, and utility of phonemic awareness for the activity of...

In a study of 3rd- and 4th-grade children it was established that orthographic processing ability can account for variance in word recognition skill after the variance due to phonological processing has been partialed out. This independent orthographic variance was related to performance on a new measure of individual differences in exposure to pri...

Previous research has demonstrated the superiority of a Simultaneous Oral Spelling method for young children beginning to learn to spell words. In this technique, children learn words by repeating a word spoken and written for them, writing the word while pronouncing the name of each letter, and then repeating the whole word again. In two experimen...

there is still much we do not know about the interrelationships among reading-related cognitive processes in adults we provide what we believe is a fairer test of this hypothesis [that reading comprehension variance is identical to listening comprehension variance in the adult] employed the sentence context paradigm utilized in previous researc...

Ten different phonological awareness tasks were administered to a group of kindergarten children whose reading ability was assessed 1 year later. The extraneous cognitive requirements inherent in the tasks varied widely. The children's performance on three tasks that involved a rhyming response was at ceiling, and these tasks did not correlate with...

The speed and accuracy with which 56 skilled or less skilled readers read words in and out of context was assessed in the fall and spring of the 1st grade by having both groups read random lists of words and coherent paragraphs. The context of the coherent paragraph facilitated word recognition performance to a greater degree in the spring than in...

Fifty-six first-grade children were administered measures of general intelligence, decoding speed, phonological awareness, and listening comprehension. All four types of measures were moderately related to end-of-year reading comprehension. Decoding speed accounted for the largest amount of unique variance. The hypothesis that reading is strongly r...

Second- and sixth-grade children named words preceded by either congruous, neutral, or incongruous contexts that were either one or three sentences long, and were drawn from second-grade reading materials. Both groups displayed significant contextual facilitation and contextual inhibition effects on naming time. The effects did not depend upon the...

A discrete-trial RT methodology was used to measure the speed with which 2 groups of 1st-grade children ( n = 109) (one tested twice during the school year) named letters. The relation of letter-naming speed to reading ability, although statistically significant, was much smaller than that observed in previous research in which a continuous-list pr...

Experiment 1 was a study in which three times during the school year (in September, February, and April) first graders performed a discrete-trial Stroop task in which they named the colors of stimuli that were either letters, high-frequency words, or low-frequency words. The amount of interference caused by these stimuli was assessed by comparing t...

[suggest that] individual differences in home and family environment are hypothesized to play a large role in children's cognitive growth / delineates the relation between 1st-grade literacy environment and the development of children's orthographic and phonological skills / followed a group of 1st-grade children, and 10 yrs later, assessed their l...

in studies employing both adults and children we have attempted to address these two basic questions: first, can orthographic processing ability account for variance in word recognition and spelling once all the variance associated with phonological processing skill has been partialled out / second, can orthographic processing variance be linked to...

begins with a brief overview of the historical connections between developmental and educational psychology, with special reference to some key theorists / volumes of the "Journal of Educational Psychology" published since 1910 are sampled for clues about historical trends in developmental research in education / contemporary issues in learning, cu...

Phonemic awareness, the ability to examine language independent of its meaning and to manipulate component sounds of language is highly implicated in reading acquisition. However, the precise nature of this relationship has yet to be specified. A variety of studies have investigated age and ability with respect to phonemic awareness, but no one stu...

Thesis (M.A.)--Oakland University, 1980. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-53).