Reading Assistance Research Articles

Write and Read Assist Techniques for SRAM Memories in Nanometer Technology

SRAM cell stability is the primary concern for future technologies due to process variations like threshold voltage and supply voltage scaling etc. The increased effect of process variation and increase in parasitic resistance and capacitance in Nano scale technologies, the lower supply voltages, continuous increase in the size of SRAMs requires additional techniques such as write assist and read assist to improve the write-ability, readability and stability of SRAM memories. In this paper various write and read assist techniques are analyzed with their pros and cons and each technique is explained with their implementation and their impact on write-ability, readability and stability of the SRAM memory. The SRAM bit cell write-ability is very critical at lower voltages. The impact of the write assist technique analyzed across the process, voltage and temperature range. Along with improving the write-ability of the SRAM cell the write assist techniques will impact the performance, power and area of the chip. At lower voltages the noise margin is very crucial for the SRAM cell stability. Read assist techniques help in improving the cell stability and these techniques analyzed across the process, voltage and temperature range. These read assist techniques not only helps the readability and stability of SRAM bit cells but they also will impact the performance, power and area of the chip.

Measuring the Effects of Reading Assistance Dogs on Reading Ability and Attitudes in Elementary Schoolchildren

ABSTRACTReading assistance dogs can be incorporated into reading programs to increase a child’s desire and ability to read. However, more data is needed to demonstrate the effectiveness of such programs. A 5-week reading assistance dog program was implemented to assess feasibility and effectiveness. Participants included 18 children entering the 2nd grade (nine assigned to read to dogs and nine assigned to read without dogs present). Fifteen children completed the study (nine in the dog group and six in the control group; p = .058). To detect changes in reading ability and in attitudes toward reading, a Curriculum Based Measurement (CBM) for reading and an Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (ERAS) was given at Week 0 and Week 5. There were no significant differences over the course of the study in ERAS scores for the dog group, but the control group had significant reductions in the ERAS academic score (p =.04). There was a numerically larger but not statistically different reduction in CBM in the control group compared to the dog group (p = .16). Further studies are warranted to determine if these trends represent statistically significant effects of reading assistance dog programs.

Code Reading Assistance for Functional Programming based on Variable Def-use Relationships

Code Reading Assistance for Functional Programming based on Variable Def-use Relationships

PubstractHelper: A Web-based Text-Mining Tool for Marking Sentences in Abstracts from PubMed Using Multiple User-Defined Keywords.

While a huge amount of information about biological literature can be obtained by searching the PubMed database, reading through all the titles and abstracts resulting from such a search for useful information is inefficient. Text mining makes it possible to increase this efficiency. Some websites use text mining to gather information from the PubMed database; however, they are database-oriented, using pre-defined search keywords while lacking a query interface for user-defined search inputs. We present the PubMed Reading Helper (PubstractHelper) website which combines text mining and reading assistance for an efficient PubMed search. PubstractHelper can accept a maximum of ten groups of keywords, within each group containing up to ten keywords. The principle behind the text-mining function of PubstractHelper is that keywords contained in the same sentence are likely to be related. PubstractHelper highlights sentences with co-occurring keywords in different colors. The user can download the PMID and the abstracts with color markings to be reviewed later. The PubstractHelper website can help users to identify relevant publications based on the presence of related keywords, which should be a handy tool for their research.Availabilityhttp://bio.yungyun.com.tw/ATM/PubstractHelper.aspx and http://holab.med.ncku.edu.tw/ATM/PubstractHelper.aspx

Motivating study groups across the disciplines in secondary schools

This article introduces Project RAISSE: Reading Assistance Initiative for Secondary School Educators and shares the findings of a study into those factors found to motivate study group participants at two rural high schools in the southern USA. The research team collected qualitative data over a two-year period, including interviews, artifacts, observations, blogs and surveys. Data were analyzed for any indication of that which positively or negatively impacted participants using a content analysis approach. The inquiry yielded the following four categories found to motivate study group participation in a secondary school setting: creating an environment for adult learning; translating new literacy learning into practice; providing and developing materials and resources; and blogging to continue conversation. The article offers a detailed framework for developing and implementing a network of onsite study groups designed to motivate teachers’ ongoing learning that impacts instructional improvement. The conceptual framework underpinning Project RAISSE offers insight into how we might address systemic professional development for secondary schools that has a good chance of improving instructional practice and positively affecting student achievement.

Predictive validity of curriculum-based measurement and teacher ratings of academic achievement

Two alternative universal screening approaches to identify students with early learning difficulties were examined, along with a combination of these approaches. These approaches, consisting of (a) curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and (b) teacher ratings using Performance Screening Guides (PSGs), served as predictors of achievement tests in reading and mathematics. Participants included 413 students in grades 1, 2, and 3 in Tennessee (n=118) and Wisconsin (n=295) who were divided into six subsamples defined by grade and state. Reading and mathematics achievement tests with established psychometric properties were used as criteria within a concurrent and predictive validity framework. Across both achievement areas, CBM probes shared more variance with criterion measures than did teacher ratings, although teacher ratings added incremental validity among most subsamples. PSGs tended to be more accurate for identifying students in need of assistance at a 1-month interval, whereas CBM probes were more accurate at a 6-month interval. Teachers indicated that (a) false negatives are more problematic than are false positives, (b) both screening methods are useful for identifying early learning difficulties, and (c) both screening methods are useful for identifying students in need of interventions. Collectively, these findings suggest that the two types of measures, when used together, yield valuable information about students who need assistance in reading and mathematics.

Faulkner Novels of Our OWN: Oprah’s Middlebrow Book Club Meets the Classics

CECILIA KONCHAR FARR St. Catherine University Faulkner Novels of Our OWN: Oprah’s Middlebrow Book Club Meets the Classics THIS ESSAY ON OPRAH’S SUMMER OF FAULKNER WILL TAKE UP THE FRONT half of the peculiar literary pairing that calls these articles together in Mississippi Quarterly. Fifteen years ago, I unintentionally became an Oprah expert when my women’s college students challenged me to watch her TV Book Club. A feminist theorist and scholar of American literature, I was fascinated by what I saw, and I have been watching and studying Oprah’s Book Club since. My role, then, is to cast some bright daytime TV light on what happened when Oprah’s Book Club encountered Faulkner in the summer of 2005. I argue here that, as impressive as it was (and it was impressive), the Summer of Faulkner did not represent the best of Oprah’s Book Club. By the time Winfrey recommended Faulkner, her Book Club was nearly ten years old and faltering.1 Three years earlier she had cancelled it altogether. When she revamped the format and returned after a year’s hiatus in 2003, some of the best elements of her original Book Club were gone, and, though the Book Club continues today after several more format shifts, it still has never returned to what it did best. The many iterations of Oprah’s Book Club, including the classics version that featured Faulkner, have been markedly less consistent, noticeably less populist, and surprisingly less substantial than the Book Club in its first six years, as I will demonstrate here. My contention is that Oprah’s Book Club worked better when it paid attention to viewers than when it responded to its critics, and it functioned more effectively when it let everyday readers talk than when it invited them to listen to professors. TheSummerofFaulkner,asothershavenoted,involvedaremarkable collection of online literary resources. As Malin Pereira points out in her essay “Oprah’s Book Club and the American Dream,” the Classics Book 1 This essay follows the practice among Oprah scholars of using “Winfrey” when referring to the person, “Oprah” when referring to the production or television persona, and “Oprah!” when referencing the talk show. 424 Cecilia Konchar Farr Club was “pointedly and actively educational, with academics obviously involved in the production of the Web site background information, study questions, and e-mail reading assistance” (201). On Oprah.com during the Summer of Faulkner, visitors were directed to “Oprah’s Classroom” to watch video lectures, ponder reading questions, and take quizzes. They could print out a bookmark with reading deadlines, as on a college syllabus, and there were guides for each novel, with reading tips and scholarly (though accessible) essays—about Faulkner’s links to Toni Morrison, his background and biography, his use of myth, and strategies for reading his modernist narrative (like a mystery, like a jury trial, like a symphony). In the Summer of Faulkner, readers all over the country got to know Thadious M. Davis, Robert W. Hamblin, Phillip and Arnold Weinstein, Jay Parini, Donald Kartiganer, and other Faulkner scholars. By all of our academic standards, this was quality material. Taking advantage of the best resources available, Oprah turned her Book Club into an online classroom that summer. It was the culmination of Oprah’s engagement with literary classics—and the furthest she separated her books from her original talk show format. No matter how successful we now perceive it to have been, Winfrey and her producers apparently considered it a step too far. Only a month after the Summer of Faulkner ended, the Book Club backpedaled from classics when Oprah selected James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. and announced her return to a more diverse book list, including more memoirs. Most of you probably know how that turned out, with accusations of dishonesty leveled against Frey, a recall of his book, and a dramatic TV smack-down where Winfrey wielded her considerable authority more overtly and imperiously than ever before (details, including videos, are still available on the website, Oprah.com). In hindsight, it should have been easy to see the decamping from classics coming. When I last revisited the Faulkner resources on the...

Japanese Learning Support Systems: Hinoki Project Report

In this report, we introduce the Hinoki project, which set out to develop web-based Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems for Japanese language learners more than a decade ago. Utilizing Natural Language Processing technologies and other linguistic resources, the project has come to encompass three systems, two corpora and many other resources. Beginning with the reading assistance system Asunaro, we describe the construction of Asunaro's multilingual dictionary and it's dependency grammar-based approach to reading assistance. The second system, Natsume, is a writing assistance system that uses large-scale corpora to provide an easy to use collocation search feature that is interesting for it's inclusion of the concept of genre. The final system, Nutmeg, is an extension of Natsume and the Natane learner corpus. It provides automatic correction of learners errors in compositions by using Natsume for its large corpus and genre-aware collocation data and Natane for its data on learner errors.

All For One, One For All

When we attend library conferences we often rush back to our libraries excited to implement some of the ideas that we've heard. Lucy Lockley presented a session at the 2012 Public Library Association Conference that focused on a staff-wide, all-inclusive readers' advisory model. With an for one, one for mentality, we receive a vision for including all staff in readers' advisory services and strengthening a service that is growing in popularity within our libraries. For those of us unable to attend the conference or her session, I asked her if she would be willing to be a guest author so that she could share her ideas with all of us. Fortunately, Lockley agreed to write an article for this column that explores her ideas on a readers' advisory model as library-wide initiative and the success that can be achieved when all staff are included in book discussions and readers' advisory training.--Editor Alexandre Dumas had the right idea with his motto for the Three Musketeers. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and their young friend, d'Artagnan, worked as a team and supported one another, all while defending King and country. Library staff can also be for one, one for by working together to provide great customer service, which promotes the library and supports their community. A major component of customer service is readers' advisory and encouraging reading is what libraries are all about. One way to build a group of library Musketeers is to have all staff trained in readers' advisory and encourage them to develop their reading interests. Libraries have found that a readers' advisory query can come not only in many forms, but also can be asked of any and all members of the staff. Therefore it shouldn't matter whether a staff member is helping an individual find a copy of the current bestseller or assisting someone in understanding how to download an e-book. Nor should it matter if staff are talking about authors and titles while participating in a book discussion or if they are engaging a customer in a quick conversation about reading during the checkout process. The best way for libraries to continue providing good service to their users is for all staff to receive training in readers' advisory. Customers do not always wait to ask for reading assistance at a service desk. Some library users seem to be afraid to come to the desk, and seek out staff in a more comfortable or personal setting before asking for help. Reading is, after all, a personal matter that is specific to the individual. What appeals to one reader does not necessarily appeal to another. Libraries have found that a staff member who is shelving in the stacks is just as likely to be asked about readers' advisory as someone working the reference or checkout desks. Therefore it would be useful if every member of the library staff was able to offer at least one title suggestion from every popular genre, know of a coworker who reads the same author, be familiar enough to point out a display containing titles of possible interest, or mention that the library has electronic readers' advisory resources that may be able to help. These are all basic tenets of readers' advisory and good customer-service practices. One of the best ways to develop reading interests is to talk about those interests and engage others in talking about books. Book discussions are not only fun but can be empowering and inspire creativity. Discussions, especially book discussions, involve more than one person and can act as a catalyst for ideas. They also can help to improve teamwork, often present new areas of interest, and encourage understanding. Some library systems have developed genre study programs open to all members of the staff to ensure that their employees can provide readers' advisory services. Such programs often use a book discussion format or a combination of book discussion and book talk meetings to cover multiple genres and nonfiction topics. …

Understanding Academic Plagiarism in Schools

This paper discusses the importance of tutoring phonics in American High Schools. There are two distinct methods mentioned: Peer-Assisted tutoring and the Granger Cross-Age Tutoring Method. The Granger method is useful for Secondary students who are not in need of severe assistance in reading and phonics. The Peer-Assisted Tutoring Method is beneficial when both tutor and tutee are on an elementary reading level. This method ensures less embarrassment and frustration from the tutee because the tutor is also on the same reading level.

Polyester non-woven fabric finger cover as a TRUCT Braille reading assistance tool for Braille learners

Transparent resinous ultraviolet-curing type (TRUCT) Braille signs are becoming more and more popular in Japan, especially when they are printed together with visual characters. These signs are made by screen printing, a technique that can be applied to various base materials, such as paper, metal, and plastic. TRUCT Braille signs have begun to be used in public facilities, such as on tactile maps and on handrails. Naturally, it is expected that Braille beginners will utilize these signs. However, it has been pointed out that the friction between the forefinger and the base material may affect reading accuracy and speed. In this study, we developed a finger cover made of soft, thin polyester non-woven fabric to reduce friction during Braille reading. We also carried out a study to investigate the effect of its use. The subjects were 12 Braille learners with acquired visual impairment, who were asked to read randomly selected characters with and without the finger cover. The results showed that most participants could read TRUCT Braille significantly faster and more accurately with a finger cover than without it, regardless of the base material and dot height. This result suggests that wearing the finger cover enables Braille learners to read TRUCT Braille more efficiently. The finger cover can be used as a Braille reading assistance tool for Braille learners. An additional, health-related advantage of the finger cover is that the forefinger remains clean. We expect that the finger cover will be in practical use in Japan within 1 or 2 years.

Preschool Predictors of the Need for Early Remedial and Special Education Services

Abstract We examined child, family, and early child care predictors of teacher reports of referral for or placement in special and remedial education for 999 youth. Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development and nested multivariate modeling techniques, we found that sociodemographic factors, child cognitive abilities, and child behavior were most strongly associated with special education services. Specifically, lower income, cognitive ability, prosocial ability, and maternal sensitivity (as defined by ratings of mother‐child interactions) were all associated with both remedial (e.g., reading assistance) and special education (e.g., part‐ and full‐day resource room) services by second grade. Child birth order and number of measurement times (6, 15, 24, 36, and 54 months) when child was in center care were associated with remedial services only, whereas child gender and parent marital status (never partnered) were associated ...

A Multifunctional Reading Assistant for the Visually Impaired

In the growing market of camera phones, new applications for the visually impaired are nowadays being developed thanks to the increasing capabilities of these equipments. The need to access to text is of primary importance for those people in a society driven by information. To meet this need, our project objective was to develop a multifunctional reading assistant for blind community. The main functionality is the recognition of text in mobile situations but the system can also deal with several specific recognition requests such as banknotes or objects through labels. In this paper, the major challenge is to fully meet user requirements taking into account their disability and some limitations of hardware such as poor resolution, blur, and uneven lighting. For these applications, it is necessary to take a satisfactory picture, which may be challenging for some users. Hence, this point has also been considered by proposing a training tutorial based on image processing methods as well. Developed in a user-centered design, text reading applications are described along with detailed results performed on databases mostly acquired by visually impaired users.

Internet usage by low-literacy adults seeking health information: an observational analysis.

Background Adults with low literacy may encounter informational obstacles on the Internet when searching for health information, in part because most health Web sites require at least a high-school reading proficiency for optimal access.Objective The purpose of this study was to 1) determine how low-literacy adults independently access and evaluate health information on the Internet, 2) identify challenges and areas of proficiency in the Internet-searching skills of low-literacy adults.Methods Subjects (n=8) were enrolled in a reading assistance program at Bidwell Training Center in Pittsburgh, PA, and read at a 3rd to 8th grade level. Subjects conducted self-directed Internet searches for designated health topics while utilizing a think-aloud protocol. Subjects' keystrokes and comments were recorded using Camtasia Studio screen-capture software. The search terms used to find health information, the amount of time spent on each Web site, the number of Web sites accessed, the reading level of Web sites accessed, and the responses of subjects to questionnaires were assessed.Results Subjects collectively answered 8 out of 24 questions correctly. Seven out of 8 subjects selected "sponsored sites"-paid Web advertisements-over search engine-generated links when answering health questions. On average, subjects accessed health Web sites written at or above a 10th grade reading level. Standard methodologies used for measuring health literacy and for promoting subjects to verbalize responses to Web-site form and content had limited utility in this population.Conclusion This study demonstrates that Web health information requires a reading level that prohibits optimal access by some low-literacy adults. These results highlight the low-literacy adult population as a potential audience for Web health information, and indicate some areas of difficulty that these individuals face when using the Internet and health Web sites to find information on specific health topics.

The Efficacy of an Early Literacy Tutoring Program Implemented by College Students

Absctract. This article describes a two‐year study addressing the effectiveness of a highly structured, systematic tutoring intervention implemented by minimally trained college students with two cohorts of at‐risk first‐grade readers. Participants were 61 first‐grade children in Cohort 1 and 76 first‐grade children in Cohort 2. Tutors participated in three one‐hour training sessions and received occasional on‐site assistance. Individual tutoring sessions were scheduled for three to four times each week for one school year, with each cohort receiving approximately 10–14 hours of instruction across 44 sessions. The curriculum included a game to teach phonemic awareness and letter‐sound correspondence, structured word‐study activities, reading of leveled books, and simple comprehension strategies. Significant differences were found on measures of phonemic awareness and nonsense word reading for both cohorts. For Cohort 1, but not Cohort 2, significant differences were also detected for real‐word identification. Our results support using tutors to provide additional assistance and instruction in early reading, even when tutors are not professionally trained teachers.

Tutoring Phonics in Secondary School

This paper discusses the importance of tutoring phonics in American High Schools. There are two distinct methods mentioned: Peer-Assisted tutoring and the Granger Cross-Age Tutoring Method. The Granger method is useful for Secondary students who are not in need of severe assistance in reading and phonics. The Peer-Assisted Tutoring Method is beneficial when both tutor and tutee are on an elementary reading level. This method ensures less embarrassment and frustration from the tutee because the tutor is also on the same reading level.

Understanding the Gap Between an AmericaReads Program and the Tutoring Sessions: The Nesting of Challenges

Increasingly, students receive tutoring for reading assistance. While some information exists about the features of various programs, little is known about the overlay between the planned tutoring program and what a tutor actually does. This investigation fills that void by exploring whether tutors in an AmericaReads program implement the planned program. To make this determination, artifacts stemming from the tutoring sessions, audiotapes of representative lessons, interviews of supervisors, and questionnaires completed by tutors were examined. The findings unveiled an inconsistent fidelity to the tutoring expectations. To further understand why these mismatches occurred, specific features of this AmericaReads program were examined. Here, organizational difficulties were detected that further explained the challenge of a program like AmericaReads to ensure that tutor actions reflect the planned program.

Instructional Strategies for Content-Area Reading Instruction

Students with reading disabilities in middle and high school grades need assistance in content-area reading to integrate new information with their prior knowledge, to obtain important information from the text, and to remember what they have read. Thus, content area reading instruction is an important component of all secondary curricula and includes strategy instruction in word identification, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the components of content-area reading instruction and to describe instructional strategies that can be used to teach students with reading disabilities how to approach content area reading.

Reading acquisition using phonemic strategies for students experiencing difficulties with learning: A case study

Phonemic awareness, or the ability to recognise spoken words as a sequence of individual sounds is thought to have a positive correlation with early reading success. This case study was developed to investigate incorporating phonemic awareness strategies into programs of reading acquisition, for students experiencing difficulties with learning. The study targeted two eleven year old girls who were classified as non readers at the beginning of the year of the study (1996). The two students were observed as members of two separate groups, one using the JHRASS program (Teaching Handwriting, Reading and Spelling Skills) which is based on phonemic awareness strategies and the other DI (Direct Instruction). These were administered over an eight week period to determine the nature and extent of differences arising between the programs, including transfer into other work areas. The comparative data was generated from a participant observer's activities, including observational notes and reflections kept in a teacher diary, together with gains measured via a series of pre and post tests administered to each student. Results indicated that the student on the phoneme‐grapheme based program THRASS appeared to make more significant gains than her matched partner receiving Direct Instruction, even in the short time period of this study. The THRASS program was observed to increase accessibility to everyday reading material, provide an easy modeling tool for adult assistance in spelling and reading and provide a more consistent basis on which to make judgments or choices of graphemes‐phonemes without having to learn a variety of rules or sayings. The study findings provide strong evidence to suggest further investigation into THRASS and other phonemic awareness based programs.

Teachers, Children with Reading Difficulties, and Remedial Reading Assistance in Primary Schools

While there is a body of research addressing the causes of reading difficulty and the identification and remediation of children with a reading difficulty, little is reported regarding the type and adequacy of assistance that these children actually receive in school. This study addresses the latter two issues. A random sample of 110 Year 3 teachers from State primary schools answered questions concerning school resources for assisting children with a reading difficulty, main method of teaching reading, their beliefs concerning reading difficulty, and their own level of general teaching experience and experience and training in managing reading difficulty. These teachers then provided information concerning the ability level, behavioural problems, perceived cause of reading difficulty, assessment, and adequacy of assistance for 303 Year 3 children whom they identified as having a reading difficulty. Results indicated that 42.7% of teachers predominantly used a whole language approach to teaching reading and that, by teacher definition, only 36.6% of children were receiving adequate assistance for their reading difficulty. Regression analysis showed that the factors most strongly associated with adequate assistance were a less severe level of reading difficulty, a higher level of support available within the school, and more children with reading difficulty in the class. The implications of these findings and other characteristics of the children with reading difficulties are discussed.