From The Editors

Abstract

Dear Colleagues, In this issue, we focus on literacy learning across grade levels and address interesting and important issues related to measurement, reading skills, and vocabulary. The first article addresses shared writing and the nature and variability of adults’ mediation in second-grade classrooms in Zambia. Kalindi, McBride, and Dan categorize the quality of mediation and its relation to children's word reading and writing. The results highlight the importance of caregivers’ support in writing in an orthography and region that has not been investigated in previous research. The next article addresses an area of great interest to readers of Reading Research Quarterly. Hiebert, Goodwin, and Cervetti, address the distribution of words in texts at different points of schooling. In the first section of the article, they identify a corpus of vocabulary through the lens of morphological families that appear to account for the majority of words in texts. The authors then examine the most common texts identified within the Common Core State Standards to determine the degree to which these words are most frequent. The results should be highly relevant to educators, publishers, and researchers. The third article in this issue will be of great interest to those who are familiar with a commonly used early literacy assessment tool, the Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement. Although this instrument has been used extensively, D'Agostino, Rodgers, and Mauck carefully examine it and note some of its inadequacies. To address these issues, and potentially mitigate its limitations, the authors employ Rasch analyses, creating a scale that can be used to assess children's literacy achievement. In so doing, they combined the instrument's task scores and found that the total scores allow researchers to provide a more precise and efficient means of screening young children than the individual task scores. This research has important implications for further screening and instruction, which the authors describe in greater detail. The next article addresses another measurement issue, one that has intrigued reading researchers for many years. It examines the reliability and validity of eye movement measures on children's reading skill. Foster, Ardoin, and Binder argue that despite the use of these in research, to date there has been little analysis of the reliability and validity of eye movements as measures of reading. Therefore, the current study was designed to investigate this important issue with 175 second graders as they engaged in silent reading of narrative texts at two timepoints. The results of the study indicated reliability and validity on passage-level measures. At the same time, elementary students’ reading behaviors were weakly associated with their normative levels of reading achievement. The authors describe important implications on the degree to which eye movement data might enhance our knowledge of children's reading behaviors. Gouldthorp, Katsipis, and Mueller focus on the role of sequencing ability in children's reading comprehension. In this study, the authors compare whether children's high reading comprehension differs from those with low reading comprehension in their sequencing skill, their ability to recall the temporal order of details and events in a narrative. As one might predict, the high comprehenders were more able to sequence events, suggesting that sequencing may be an important factor in reading comprehension. Gouldthorp et al. argue that sequencing skill may be an important and often overlooked reading comprehension skill that could benefit from more direct teaching in the future. The sixth article addresses the highly relevant topic of argumentation for secondary students. It draws on observations from 40 secondary students in a range of lessons, examining the opportunities for these students to engage in argumentation. Litman and Greenleaf examined two broad dimensions of argumentation—instructional and inquiry—and found that they often focus on predetermined questions, answers, and content. In contrast, interactive argumentation tasks were generally more student directed and initiated. Based on their analysis, the authors argue for providing more time for interactive argumentation activities that allow students to inquire rather than merely respond. The final article in this issue comes from a team of scholars headed by Frijters. They conducted a large-scale analysis of reading-related causal attributions and reading skills. Analyzing over 1,000 school-age children from two understudied populations, African Americans and Hispanic Americans, the researchers found that reading-related attributions predicted contextual word recognition sight words, decoding skills, and comprehension. These results provide convincing evidence of the relation between reading and attribution, which varies according to reading skill level. Altogether, this issue of Reading Research Quarterly addresses many important research and instructional topics that should be of great interest to the literacy audience. We hope you enjoy and benefit from the researchers’ careful analysis, rigor, and attention to detail and the studies’ implications for practice in the field. Susan B. Neuman Linda B. Gambrell