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Improving the Reading and Writing Skills of America's Students
Abstract
We have learned a great deal about the academic challenges that children with learning disabilities face in school. The National Longitudinal Transition Study (Valdes, Williamson, & Wagner, 1990) data show, for example, that grade point averages of children with learning disabilities are lower than those of other students, that children with learning disabilities frequently receive failing grades, and that they are more likely to drop out of school entirely. Only 61% of out-of-school youth with learning disabilities graduated from high school compared to 76% for the general population of youth. The group of students ages 6 to 21 who are identified as having specific learning disabilities and served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is the largest among all disability groups served — around 2.5 million students, representing more than half of all students with disabilities. This number continues to grow.
We have learned some promising practices for teaching reading and writing to children with learning disabilities. The practices involve beginning early and working with the children on a daily basis, including the summer months. Most children who are classified as having learning disabilities in public schools have reading disabilities (Kavale & Forness, 1985).
... Twenty-five percent of adults cannot read directions on a prescription, or decode a note sent home from school-they are functionally illiterate. Illiteracy figures are even more staggering for adults with LD with estimates as high as 73% (Riley, 1996). These statistics should inspire educators to find the most effective methods for promoting students' reading development. ...
ABSTRACT. An overview of women’s philanthropy and analysis of examples of philanthropic support for educational institutions in the USA will be presented. Issues of gender charity will be discussed and suggestions for creating fundraising opportunities for universities will be outlined. KEYWORDS: women’s philanthropy, charity, volunteering, fundraising, higher education.
Alla Krasulia // Journal of Gender and Power – Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu, 2014. – Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 119 – 135.
... Twenty-five percent of adults cannot read directions on a prescription, or decode a note sent home from school-they are functionally illiterate. Illiteracy figures are even more staggering for adults with LD with estimates as high as 73% (Riley, 1996). These statistics should inspire educators to find the most effective methods for promoting students' reading development. ...
The article discusses children’s literature as a matter that can become highly politi‐cized. While often viewed as apolitical, stories for children have always been subjected to hegemonic ideologies and mediated dominant norms. The analysis focuses on gender dimension of this normativity and shows that the attempts to create gender subversive stories for children have to face not only the conservative backlash but they also have to deal with wider cultural context and contemporary meanings of childhood. The last section of the article shows that no matter how gender balanced or stereotypical a story is, the interpretation lies with children themselves. Thus, researchers analyzing messages in children’s stories always have to take into account young readers and their diverse ways of understanding.
... The final conclusion was that student selection of topics is valuable, especially to the beginning writer (Barry & Nielsen, 1996) . By having a choice in the writing topic, students will use the knowledge they have, which gives more opportunity for enhancing writing techniques without the worry of subject matter (Riley, 1996). ...
... In fact, being a competent reader is fundamentally important for being successful in school as well as in adult life (Fuchs, Fuchs & Kazdan, 1999;McShane, 2005). Although reading skills are recognized as crucial to survive in schools and daily life, 71% of eight grade students (Lee, Grigg, & Donahue, 2007) and 60% of twelfth grade students (Grigg, Donahue, & Dion, 2007) in schools of the United States of America (USA) do not exhibit grade level reading proficiency, and twenty-five percent of adults in the USA are functionally illiterate (Riley, 1996). ...
Reading fluency is a reliable indicator of overall reading competency, functioning as a bridge between word identification and comprehension. According to research literature, repeated reading is an effective intervention to enhance the reading fluency and comprehension of students with reading difficulties. This study discusses results from a single subject study of a repeated reading intervention, conducted in an afterschool program in the United States of America with volunteer tutors, on the oral reading fluency of four elementary students with low reading ability. Findings suggest that repeated reading intervention helps struggling readers improve their reading fluency and consequently reading comprehension skills. Additionally, this study showed that an evidence - based reading intervention can be implemented in afterschool programs with volunteer tutors and results in rea ding gains for students with reading difficulties in afterschool settings.
... Concerns about children's writing performance have led to calls for improvements in the teaching of writing (e.g., Riley, 1996) as well as aggressive efforts by many states and school districts to upgrade the quality of their writing instruction (e.g., Bridge, Compton-Hall, & Cantrell, 1997). The success of these efforts depends, in part, on providing writing instruction that is responsive to children's individual needs (Graham & Harris, 2002a). ...
Primary grade teachers from across the United States were surveyed about their instructional adaptations for weaker writers. Although many teachers were sensitive to struggling writers' individual needs, there was a sizable percentage of teachers (42%) who made few or no adaptations. The most common adaptations made by teachers addressed students' difficulties with the mechanics of writing or writing processes, such as planning and revising. Other adaptations that were relatively common involved providing extra conferences, minilessons, and reteaching. Percentage of classroom students with special needs and amount of time students spend writing each week both made a significant contribution to predicting the number of adaptations reported by teachers, once the contribution of all other variables was controlled. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... Concerns about children's writing have led to calls for improvements in the teaching of writing (e.g., Riley, 1996), with many states and school districts designing and implementing procedures to boost students' writing performance (e.g., Bridge, Compton-Hall, & Cantrell, 1997). This is a particularly challenging task, however, as skilled writing requires the acquisition and coordination of strategies for regulating the writing process (e.g., strategies for planning, monitoring, evaluating, and revising), skills for producing text (e.g., handwriting, spelling, sentence construction), and knowledge about specific genres, writing conventions, and so forth Hayes, 1996;Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1986). ...
Writing is a very demanding task, requiring the orchestration of a variety of cognitive resources. For developing writers, it can be especially demanding, as they have not yet mastered important writing processes, skills, and knowledge involved in planning, drafting, and revising text. In the present study, middle school students were directly taught strategies that facilitated the execution of each of these processes. They were also taught the knowledge and skills needed to carry out these strategies. In comparison to peers in the control condition, students in the experimental treatment condition produced essays that were longer, contained more mature vocabulary, and were qualitatively better. These gains were evident immediately following instruction and on a short-term maintenance probe administered 1 month later. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... Adams (as cited in Fuchs and Fuchs, 200 1) described illiterate individuals as representing 75% of the unemployed population, 33% of mothers receiving aid to families of dependent children, and 60% of incarcerated adults. Illiterate adults do not have the necessary skills to do such things as reading a note sent home from school or reading the directions on a medicine bottle (Riley, 1996). As illustrated, poor reading skills often cause difficulty into adulthood. ...
Includes bibliographical references.
New US government requirements state that federally funded grants and school programs must prove that they are based on scientifically proved improvements in teaching and learning. All new grants must show they are based on scientifically sound research to be funded, and budgets to schools must likewise show that they are based on scientifically sound research. However, the movement in education over the past several years has been toward qualitative rather than quantitative measures. The new legislation comes at a time when researchers are ill trained to measure results or even to frame questions in an empirical way, and when school administrators and teachers are no longer remember or were never trained to prove statistically that their programs are effective. Experimental Methods for Evaluating Educational Interventions is a tutorial on what it means to frame a question in an empirical manner, how one needs to test that a method works, what statistics one uses to measure effectiveness, and how to document these findings in a way so as to be compliant with new empirically based requirements. The book is simplistic enough to be accessible to those teaching and administrative educational professionals long out of schooling, but comprehensive and sophisticated enough to be of use to researchers who know experimental design and statistics but don't know how to use what they know to write acceptable grant proposals or to get governmental funding for their programs.
This chapter describes the systematic tests performed to analyze the effectiveness of a treatment designed to teach young struggling writers the strategies for planning their compositions. Assessment of this intervention was compatible with the “careful” intervention research. This intervention research yields scientifically convincing evidence, if appropriate comparisons repeatedly demonstrate a direct relationship between the treatment and specified outcomes when other competing explanations of the outcomes are eliminated. An effective line of intervention research does not begin in a vacuum, but is preceded by a thorough review of theories and research, careful observations, the development of preliminary ideas and hypotheses, and pilot work to test the feasibility of the intervention or proposed assessments. Planning is the focal point of this intervention. Learning how to apply a strategy does not guarantee that students will use it when the opportunity arises or be able to adapt it to new, but appropriate, situations. One reason why students fail to use or transfer a learned strategy is that they do not recognize when to use it or how to adapt it to new situations. They may be reluctant to use a new strategy because it requires more effort or work than the procedures they routinely use.
Lack of reading motivation impedes upper elementary and secondary school students’ willingness to improve critical reading skills and strategies to be successful in school. Struggling readers often show a negative attitude towards reading tasks and manifest low motivation to read. Although the importance of motivation is clear, there is limited research on reading motivation of struggling adolescents with disabilities. This study examined whether reading motivation of struggling readers with and without disabilities significantly changed after an eighteen week period of reading instruction in two elementary schools and one high school in a Midwest state of the United States of America (USA). Findings yielded significant improvement in motivation for adolescents without disabilities while motivation scores declined for students with disabilities. An overview of students’ answers to survey questions is provided and some evidence-based methods that teachers can utilize to improve reading motivation of upper elementary and high school students are summarized.
This study examined the effects of peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS) on students' literacy development and beliefs about reading, when PALS is implemented with secondary-level students in remedial and special education classes. Teachers were assigned to PALS (n = 9 classes) and contrast (n = 9 classes) treatments. Teachers implemented PALS with their entire classes five times every 2 weeks, for 16 weeks. To designate research participants for outcome measurement, teachers identified all students whose reading instructional levels were Grades 2 through 6. Reading comprehension and fluency were measured before and after treatment; beliefs were indexed after treatment. Analyses of variance indicated that, compared to contrast counterparts, PALS students grew more on reading comprehension and reported more positive beliefs about working hard to improve reading. However, PALS and contrast students grew comparably on reading fluency and reported similar beliefs about being and wanting to become better readers. Implications are discussed for developing effective forms of peer-mediated instruction for use in high school remedial and special education classes.
The purpose of this article is to describe downward and upward extensions of Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) in reading, which was originally developed for Grades 2-6. Extensions have occurred for kindergarten, first grade, and high school. We begin by describing our rationale for the development of PALS. Then we provide an overview of the Grades 2-6 PALS program and illustrate why additional PALS activities were required to address younger and older students' developmental needs. Finally, we describe the PALS extensions.
During the past 20 years, researchers have identified core deficits of struggling readers and developed treatments that prevent reading failure. However, whereas progress has been made toward designing generally effective reading interventions, not all children respond to these treatments. Such students have been dubbed "nonresponders," and are the current focus of a growing body of research. Because nonresponsiveness to generally effective instruction is a relatively new issue, researchers have yet to agree on how to identify nonresponders. The purpose of this article is to propose a "dual-discrepancy" approach to identifying such children. A rationale for such an approach is given. Then, curriculum-based measurement is suggested as an effective tool for detecting dual discrepancies. An example is provided from an ongoing program of research that uses the dual-discrepancy approach to identify nonresponders.
Describes and critiques 3 classroom-based assessment models for monitoring student progress toward becoming competent readers. After a discussion of a rationale for incorporating a dual focus on the assessment of students' reading levels as well as on their reading growth over time, 6 considerations in selecting monitoring systems that produce accurate, meaningful, and useful information are discussed. Then, 3 assessment methods are described and critiqued against those considerations, and research necessary to provide practitioners with an adequate classroom-based monitoring system is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examined the student-level and instruction-level predictors of narrative writing fluency and quality. Participants
included 120 third-grade students from 13 classrooms. Student predictors included measures of reading, handwriting, spelling,
IQ, grammatical understanding, and gender. Instructional predictors focused on the amount of time allocated to teaching basic
writing skills and planning skills. Significant predictors of compositional fluency included gender, advanced planning ability,
and handwriting fluency, while significant predictors of compositional quality included gender, compositional fluency, Full-scale
IQ, word reading ability, and grammatical understanding. There were no main effects of instructional variables; however there
were two student by instruction interactions. Implications of the study highlight the importance of student characteristics
in writing achievement, as well as considering the need for differential instruction based on student needs.
A model is proposed for how document literacy and prose literacy are related to young adults' occupational status and their societal participation (membership in groups, political activity, etc.). The authors rescaled and reanalyzed the data from the 1986 National Assessment of Educational Progress in the U. S. for 3,618 adults aged 21-25 years. They examined separately the respondents' literacy achievement (as measured on tests) and literacy activity (time spent reading books, newspapers, and documents). They also included background variables such as parental education, parental occupation, and years of schooling. Separate path models were formulated for literacy for documents (e.g., charts and schedules) and for literacy for prose (e.g., books and newspapers). For document literacy, occupational status and participation in society were significantly associated with document literacy activity, even after document literacy achievement and all background variables were accounted for. One ethnic difference was significant: Document literacy achievement was more highly associated with document literacy activity for blacks than for whites. For prose literacy, again occupational status and participation in society were significantly related to prose literacy activity; ethnic differences were less straightforward than for prose literacy. These results cast doubt on the hypothesis that literacy has less utility for blacks than for whites; rather, the relatively low occupational status of blacks appears to be attributable to their relatively low literacy achievement and literacy activity. /// [French] Les auteurs proposent un modèle qui permet de montrer en quoi deux types de littéracie: habileté à traiter des documents écrits (cartes, horaires, formules d'emplois) et habileté à traiter des textes écrits (livres, journeaux), sont reliés au status de l'emploi occupé par de jeunes adultes et à leur niveau de participation dans des institutions sociales (membres de groupes, d'organisations politiques etc.). L'analyse porte sur les données recueillies auprès de 3,618 jeunes adultes âgés entre 18 et 25 ans par le National Assessment of Educational Progress des Etats-Unis en 1986. Les auteurs ont examiné séparément les résultats aux tests de littéracie et les habitudes de lecture (temps consacrés à lire des livres, des journanux et des documents). Ils ont également inclus des informations sur les antécédents familiaux tels que le niveau d'éducation, l'occupation et le niveau de scolarité des parents. Des modèles statistiques séparés (path analysis: analyses de causalité) ont été développés pour chacun des types de littéracie. En ce qui concerne le premier type de littéracie (habiletés à traiter des documents), des relations significatives ont été trouvées entre le niveau d'occupation et de participation sociale et les activités de littéracie impliquant le traitement de documents et ce même après avoir éliminé les effets des variables reliées aux habiletés de traitement et aux antécédents familiaux. On observa toutefois une différence entre les deux groupes: les habiletés de traitement des documents écrits sont davantage reliées aux activités impliquant le traitement de documents écrits chez les sujets de race noire que chez les sujets de race blanche. Les résultats allèrent dans le même sens pour le second type de littéracie. Là aussi on trouva des relations significatives entre le niveau d'emploi et de participation sociale et les activités de littéracie impliquant le traitement de textes; toutefois les différences entre les deux groupes apparurent moins évidentes. Les résultats infirment donc les croyances selon lesquelles le type et le niveau de littéracie sont moins importants chez les noirs que chez les blancs; on peut penser au contraire, que le faible niveau d'emploi et de participation sociale sont liés au faible niveau de littéracie qu'atteignent les jeunes adultes noirs ce qui s'expliquerait par le type d'activités de littéracie qu'ils sont amenés à privilégier. /// [Spanish] Se propone un modelo para ver cómo la habilidad de leer documentos y prosa está relacionado con el estatus ocupacional de los adultos jóvenes y su participación social (membresía en grupos, actividad política, etc.). Los autores reescalonaron y reanalizaron los datos de la Prueba Nacional de Progreso Educativo (National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP) en los Estados Unidos aplicada a 3,618 adultos de entre 21 y 25 años de edad. Examinaron por separado el desempeño de los sujetos en su habilidad de lectura (a través de medidas en las pruebas) y la actividad de lectura (tiempo pasado leyendo libros, periódicos y otros documentos). También incluyeron otras variables de fondo como educación de los padres, ocupación de los padres y años de escolaridad. Se formularon diferentes modelos de regresión múltiple para medir la habilidad de lectura de documentos (e.g., cuadros y horarios) y para medir la habilidad de lectura de prosa (e.g., libros y periódicos). En el caso de la habilidad para leer documentos, el estatus ocupacional y la participación social fueron pronosticados de manera significativa por la actividad de lectura de documentos, aún despu5es de descontar el desempeño en la habilidad de lectura de documentos y las otras variables de fondo. Una diferencia étnica fue significativa: El logro alcanzado en la habilidad de leer documentos estaba más fuertemente asociado a la actividad de leer documentos para los negros que para los blancos. En el caso de la habilidad de leer prosa, otra vez el estatus ocupacional y la participación social fueron significativamente predichos por la actividad de lectura en prosa; las diferencias étnicas fueron menos directas que para la habilidad de leer prosa. Los resultados contradicen la hipótesis que la habilidad de lectura tiene menos utilidad para los negros que para los blancos; más bien, el estatus ocupacional relativamente bajo de los negros parece ser atribuible a su logro de lectura relativamente bajo y a su actividad literaria. /// [German] Nachstehend wird ein Modell angeboten, das die Beziehungen zwischen der Lesefähigkeit von Dokumenten und Prosatexten und dem beruflichen Ansehen und gesellschaftlichen Engagement junger Erwachsener (Mitgliedschaft in Gruppen, politische Aktivitäten, usw.) darstellt. Die Verfasser nahmen eine Neueinstufung und Neuanalyse der Daten der amerikanischen Bundesweite Beurteilung des Bildungswachstums (NAEP = National Assessment of Educational Progress) aus dem Jahr 1986 vor. Die Daten dieser Beurteilung stammten von 3,618 Erwachsenen im Alter von 21 bis 25 Jahren. Im einzelnen wurden die Leseleistungen der Beteiligten (anhand von Testen) und deren Leseaktivitäten (die Zeit, die für das Lesen von Büchern, Zeitungen und Dokumenten aufgebracht wurde) untersucht. Zusätzlich wurden Hintergrundinformationen aufgenommen, wie z.B. Schulbildung der Eltern, Beruf der Eltern und Länge der Schulbildung. Für die Lesefähigkeit von Dokumenten (z.B. Tabellen und Pläne) und von Prosatexten (z.B. Bücher und Zeitungen) wurden unterschiedliche Pfadmodelle aufgestellt. Bei der Lesefähigkeit von Dokumenten waren berufliches Ansehen und gesellschaftliches Engagement ausreichend durch Leseaktivitäten mittels Dokumenten kalkulierbar, selbst nachdem Leseleistungen für Dokumente und alle Hintergrundvariablen berücksichtigt wurden. Ein ethnischer Unterschied erwies sich als entscheidend: bei den Schwarzen stand die Leseleistung für Dokumente in engerem Zusammenhang mit Leseaktivitäten mittels Dokumenten als bei den Weißen. Auch bei der Lesefähigkeit von Prosatexten waren berufliches Ansehen und gesellschaftliches Engagement ausreichend durch Leseaktivitäten mittels Dokumenten kalkulierbar; im Gegensatz zu Prosatexten waren ethnische Unterschiede hier weniger geradlinig. Die Ergebnisse widerlegen die Hypothese, daß nämlich Lesefähigkeit für Schwarze einen geringeren Nutzen aufweist als für Weiße; vielmehr hat es den Anschein, als ob die relativ niedrigen Leseleistungen und Leseaktivitäten auf das relativ niedrige berufliche Ansehen von Schwarzen zurückzuführen seien.
This overview offers a perspective on the distinguishing characteristics, past and present, of the LD field in the United States. The discussion focuses on the complex relationships that exist among the social and political forces that have molded the field, advocacy, and research and teaching practices. It emphasizes the compelling need to establish clinical and scientific validation of LD, to preserve the hard-won achievements of advocacy.