Reading Mastery Research Articles

Which Risk Factors Predict the Basic Reading Skills of Children at Risk for Emotional and Behavioral Disorders?

Multinomial stepwise logistic regression analyses were used to establish the most robust set of risk factors that would best predict low basic reading skills (i.e., a standard score less than 85 on the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test–Revised Basic Reading Skills cluster) of kindergarten and first-grade children at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. Results showed that among the 11 risk factor domains considered, four were most predictive of low reading skills: demographic characteristics, childhood maladjustment, family functioning, and maternal depression. Within these four domains, the most robust set of individual risk factors were gender, history of psychiatric hospitalization, abusive to animals, and maternal depression. Results, limitations, and implications are discussed.

Order in the House! Associations among Household Chaos, the Home Literacy Environment, Maternal Reading Ability, and Children’s Early Reading

The current study examines whether associations exist between household chaos and children's early reading skills, after controlling for a comprehensive battery of home literacy environment characteristics. Our sample included 455 kindergarten and First-grade children who are enrolled in the Western Reserve Reading Project. We go on to test whether these associations are moderated by maternal reading ability. Results suggest that the degree of household order is significantly and positively associated with the expressive vocabulary, Woodcock Reading Mastery, and phonological awareness skills of children whose mothers are above-average readers. By contrast, the number of books a child owns or brings home and how often a child amuses self alone with books are significantly associated with the expressive vocabulary, Woodcock Reading Mastery, and phonological awareness skills of children whose mothers ore average-ability readers. These results suggest the potential for new approaches to encouraging literacy development in the home beyond those that depend solely on parental literacy.

Associations Between Key Language-Related Measures in Typically Developing School-Age Children

Associations Between Key Language-Related Measures in Typically Developing School-Age Children

¿Por qué Leer Bien es Importante?: Asociación del Dominio Lector con Otros Aprendizajes

“Fundacion Educacional Arauco (Fundar)” using data from the evaluation of programs and research, from different counties of Chile during the years 2001 to 2005, conducted a study of 1782 students from fi rst to eight grade, to analize the association between Level of Reading Mastery and their performance in other areas of learning. The results of this study show a signifi cant association between the students level of “Oral Reading Quality” and their performance in different skills such as reading comprehension, use of vocabulary and writing, the management of contents in Language, Mathematics, History and Science, as well as with their level self-esteem. It is interesting to share these results in order to enhance the importance of early development of the student’s reading process, together with other skills, and to strengthen it until they reach full mastery.

Scripted Reading Instruction? What's a Teacher Educator to Do?

WHY NOT learn to teach reading from a script? What role does improvisation play in teaching reading with a lesson plan or even with a script? Does a teacher who knows more about phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and motivation teach more effectively from a script than one who knows less about these domains of reading? As an external evaluator for Georgia's First Initiative, funded under the No Child Left Behind Act, and as a university teacher educator, I find myself pondering these questions. Every school receiving Reading First funds in Georgia must use a core reading program. Some core programs require teachers to read from a script to deliver explicit, systematic reading instruction (e.g., Reading Mastery Plus and the Voyager Core K-3 Reading Program). The scripted reading instruction of today comes, in one way or another, from Siegfried Engelmann and Carl Bereiter, who in the 1960s developed the direct instruction method of teaching reading to raise the academic success of inner-city children. (1) The pedagogy of a fully scripted teacher's guide has an even longer history. In 1888 Samuel and Adeline Monroe published one of the earliest texts for teachers with complete scripts for teaching reading readiness, phonics, and oral reading. (2) My observations of scripted reading lessons have me thinking anew about prior assumptions. My history with the scripted teaching of reading consists of three experiences. The first experience was in 1990 while I was studying for a doctoral degree in literacy education. I was curious to see for myself what a direct instruction approach to teaching reading was, because of the critiques I was hearing. I visited a school where the program, Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading (DISTAR), was well established. (3) The teacher I observed was reading from a script in the teacher's manual. She was animated, and the children responded confidently, fulfilling their part as the audience. While I admired the lively interactions, I thought the text bizarre. It was about the adventures of a fly. The teacher asked questions about where the fly went and what misadventures he had. It seemed they were engaged in such low-level comprehension as identifying explicit question-answer relationships. (4) It seemed doubtful to me that reading an anthropomorphic story about a day in the life of a fly was edifying. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My observation of the DISTAR reading lesson occurred at a time when I was researching teaching for critical thinking through dialogical discussions of text. (5) I was presenting schoolchildren labeled learning disabled with stories that had content that allowed us to discuss a central question in which there were at least two plausible conclusions. For example, we read Sheila Greenwald's simple and short book, The Hot Day. (6) We identified reasons to support two possibilities. Did the central character run away because he was scared or angry? Then we evaluated the truth and relevance of our reasons to arrive at a defensible conclusion. The scripted questions about the adventures of a fly seemed antithetical to teaching critical thinking. These were questions that could be answered directly from the text, and this was a far cry from my interest in teaching a philosophical conception of critical thinking to teachers so they could facilitate discussions of text that elicited reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to do or think. (7) I had read a study of a direct instruction approach to teaching critical reading (8) and found it unsatisfactory because dimensions of critical thinking were taught as separate skills, as opposed to the way they occur in concert in real discussions and arguments. My second experience with scripted teaching occurred much later. In 2003 I showed my university students a video that profiled teachers at Walton Elementary School in Central Texas using Reading Mastery (formerly called DISTAR) and teachers at Bearden Elementary in Alabama using Project Read, published by Language Circle Enterprises. …

Profiles of Children Served in Early Intervention Programs for Behavioral Disorders

Special education legislation has placed an increased emphasis on early intervention programs for children at risk for early literacy delays and behavioral disorders. Given this trend, it is important to understand the characteristics of students identified and served in at-risk programs. This study presents the findings from a cluster analysis on the early literacy and behavioral characteristics of 195 children screened at risk for behavioral disorders served in an early intervention program. Clustered variables included behavioral measures from the Early Screening Project (ESP; Walker, Severson, & Feil, 1995), Systematic Screening for Behavior Disorders (SSBD; Walker & Severson, 1992), and measures of early reading development from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests—Revised (WRMT-R; Woodcock, 1998). Split-half procedures and external criteria were used to validate results. Five distinct subgroups were revealed: Broad Risks, Academic Achievers, Primarily Behavior, Primarily Academic, and Extreme Behaviors. Results indicate heterogeneous characteristics and clear areas of behavioral and early reading risk between subgroups within the greater sample. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed.

Early Middle Ear Effusion and School Achievement at Age Seven Years

This study tested the hypothesis that children with early persistent middle ear effusion (MEE) are at risk for later deficits in academic performance. We recruited 698 newborns and monitored them for MEE every 2 to 4 weeks at home until age 3 years. At age 7 years, it was possible to obtain school data for 226 children. Tests included the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills or the Stanford Achievement tests, the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, and the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement. There was no significant relationship between early MEE and measures of school achievement as shown by correlations or multiple regression. Differences between extreme MEE groups were not significant. School achievement was strongly associated with ethnicity, home environment, and socioeconomic status. Early persistent MEE does not appear to affect achievement in school at age 7 years.

Improving the Reading Comprehension of Middle School Students With Disabilities Through Computer-Assisted Collaborative Strategic Reading

This study investigated the effects of computer-assisted comprehension practice using a researcher-developed computer program, Computer-Assisted Collaborative Strategic Reading (CACSR), with students who had disabilities. Two reading/ language arts teachers and their 34 students with disabilities participated. Students in the intervention group received the CACSR intervention, which consisted of 50-min instructional sessions twice per week over 10 to 12 weeks. The results revealed a statistically significant difference between intervention and comparison groups' reading comprehension ability as measured by a researcher-developed, proximal measure (i.e., finding main ideas and question generation) and a distal, standardized measure (i.e., Woodcock Reading Mastery Test, Passage Comprehension). Effect sizes for all dependent measures favored the CACSR group. Furthermore, a majority of students expressed positive overall perspectives of the CACSR intervention and believed that their reading had improved.

The Contribution of Naming Speed to the Simple View of Reading

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether naming speed makes a contribution to the prediction of reading comprehension, after taking into account the product of word decoding and listening comprehension (i.e., the Simple View of Reading; (Gough, P.B. & Tunmer, W.E. (1986). Remedial and Special Education 7 ,6 - 10)), and phonological awareness. In grade 3, word decoding was measured with the Woodcock ((1998). Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests - Revised. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Services). Word Identification and Word Attack subtests, listening comprehension with the Woodcock (1991) (Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery - Revised. Chicago: Riverside Publishing Company) test of Listening Comprehension, naming speed with a picture naming task, and 4 measures assessed phonological awareness. Reading comprehension was assessed in grades 3, 4, and 5 with the Woodcock (1998) Passage Comprehension subtest and in grade 5 with the Gates- MacGinitie reading test. The Simple View was evaluated twice: first, with a pseudoword measure for decoding (Grapheme-Phoneme-conversion product) and, second, with a word identification measure for decoding (word recognition product). Hierarchical regression and commonality analyses indicated that the decoding and listening com- prehension products accounted for considerable variance in reading comprehension. Naming speed had a small but significant effect after accounting for the Grapheme- Phoneme-conversion product (2-3%), but little effect after accounting for the word- recognition product (0-2%). Subgroup analyses indicated that naming speed had its primary effect for less able readers. Commonality analyses supported the interpretation that naming speed contributes after the Grapheme-Phoneme-conversion product but not after the word recognition product because naming speed has already had its effect upon word recognition. These results indicate that it is important how the Simple View decoding term is defined, and that the Simple View may be incomplete, especially for less able readers.

An Inquiry into Children's Reading in One Urban School using SRA Reading Mastery (Direct Instruction)

This study focused on 27 second graders in one urban school that used SRA Reading Mastery. Children's strategy use, comprehension, and perception of the reading process were appraised using samples of oral reading with retellings; classroom observations; interviews with the children, their teachers, and the principal; and a phonics test. Results showed that visual and sound cues were used heavily when reading text, but nearly half of miscues were not meaningful substitutions. Children rarely self-corrected, and their use of nonwords was high. Phonics knowledge when reading pseudowords was in the average range. Most children tackled grade-level or above grade-level authored trade books, but their retellings, corroborated by our classroom observations, indicated that talk about stories without explicit guidance from teachers was uncommon. Retellings frequently lacked coherence, elaboration, or inferences. Results from interviews with school personnel revealed that the program was strong in teaching skills, but weak in developing reading comprehension and writing.

Formulating Secondary-Level Reading Interventions

Recent advances concerning emerging/beginning reading skills, positive behavioral support (PBS), and three-tiered schoolwide prevention models combined with federal mandates (i.e., IDEA and No Child Left Behind) have stimulated interest in providing early and intensive instructional intervention services to children at risk for reading and behavior problems. New measures for identifying students as early as kindergarten who are not acquiring early basic literacy skills make this possible. However, questions regarding exactly how to formulate, deliver, sustain, and manage secondary-level interventions remain to be addressed. This paper describes first-year, first-grade findings for students participating in secondary-level interventions (i.e., small-group reading instruction) in a randomized trial of the efficacy of secondary and tertiary reading and behavior interventions under way at the Center for Early Intervention in Reading and Behavior, University of Kansas. The formulation of the experimental secondary-level intervention was guided by evidence supporting the efficacy of (a) small groups of 3 to 6 participating students and low student-teacher ratio combined with (b) explicit, phonics-based instruction. Selected curricula were Reading Mastery, Proactive Reading, Programmed Reading, and Read Well, use of which varied by choice across experimental-group schools. PBS was an additional intervention context in experimental schools. Comparison schools and first-grade teachers did not employ the three-tiered model, early screening, or PBS; most students were taught using conventional whole-group instruction, little or no individualization, and curricula with weak scientific evidence. Initial results indicate significantly larger growth for experimental secondary-level at-risk students than for comparisons. Experimental-group first graders not showing growth were those identified with disabilities or behavioral risks and English language learners. Implications are discussed.

The Disconnect of Poor‐Urban Education: Equal Access and a Pedagogy of Risk Taking

AbstractIn an age of educational accountability and school competition, the gap between current poor‐urban school performance and standards of excellence remains glaringly obvious. As poor‐urban schools scramble to “close the gap,” many abandon sound pedagogy, becoming entrenched in a curriculum where basic‐skills worksheets are the primary method of educational delivery resulting in a disconnect between pedagogically sound educational practices and those very students that need it most. Two literacy pilot programs are discussed as applied examples showing that good teaching and accountability result in increases in early reading skills as measured by the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test‐Revised (R.W. Woodcock, 1998). Results are discussed in light of raised teacher expectations, assessment‐driven small class grouping, and active student learning. In a supportive, challenging environment, the basis for a pedagogy of risk taking emerges. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 42: 855–863, 2005.

The Woodcock Reading Mastery Test

This study examined the magnitude of differences in standard scores, convergent validity, and concurrent validity when an individual's performance was gauged using the revised and the normative update (Woodcock, 1998) editions of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test in which the actual test items remained identical but norms have been updated. From three metropolitan areas, 899 first to third grade students referred by their teachers for a reading intervention program participated. Results showed the inverse Flynn effect, indicating systematic inflation averaging 5 to 9 standard score points, regardless of gender, IQ, city site, or ethnicity, when calculated using the updated norms. Inflation was greater at lower raw score levels. Implications for using the updated norms for identifying children with reading disabilities and changing norms during an ongoing study are discussed.

Efficacy of the cellfield Intervention for reading difficulties: An integrated computer‐based approach targeting deficits associated with dyslexia

Despite contemporary research on dyslexia moving toward multi‐deficit hypotheses, intervention studies tend to focus on specific causal mechanisms. The Cellfield Intervention, which involves computer‐based activities designed to remediate multiple deficits concurrently, is evaluated in the present paper. Participants were 262 Australian school children (187 males, 75 females; mean age 11.05) who undertook the ten intervention sessions at the Cellfield Clinic in 26 mean days between pre‐ and post‐ test, during a 24 month period. Pre‐ and post‐intervention data were collected using the Wide Range Achievement Test, the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests ‐ Revised, the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, and ocular assessments. Significant gains (p < .05) were made in all three sets of dependent measures analyzed (i.e., reading‐related skills, oral reading proficiency, and ocular measures) providing some support for the efficacy of an integrated approach to the treatment of reading difficulties.

Accountability for Reading and Readers: What the Numbers Don't Tell

The authors share what they learned when they assessed second graders' acts of reading. The children were in three different reading programs: Two were commercially produced and emphasized systematic, explicit phonics instruction (Reading Mastery, Open Court); the other was a literature-based program using an adaptation of guided reading. The authors address what it means to be accountable to children involved in the complex act of reading and argue that by such measures of accountability we learn much about readers that simple numbers from tests cannot tell.

Using CBM as an Indicator of Decoding, Word Reading, and Comprehension: Do the Relations Change With Grade?

The primary purpose of this study was to assess whether the relation between curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and specific reading skills changes as a function of grade. In addition, this study sought to identify cutscores that correspond with benchmark performance on a variety of reading subskills at Grades 1 through 4. Participants were 310 students, distributed approximately equally across grades, from four schools. Participants were administered CBM reading passages and the Word Attack, Word Identification, and Passage Comprehension subtests from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test—Revised. Findings indicated that the relation between CBM with decoding, word reading, passage comprehension, basic skills, and total reading-short was strong at each grade level. Benchmarks could not be differentiated for individual reading subskills, but were identified for overall reading competence at each grade level. Implications are drawn for helping school psychologists and other practitioners determine which students need further instructional support in reading.

The end of the reading age: grade and age effects in early schooling

During the school years, psychological test norms may be indexed by age or by grade. A number of studies have shown that using age-based norms appears to produce biases associated with grade assignment. Cahan and Cohen [Child Dev. 60 (1989) 1239–1249] showed that the effect of one grade was over twice the effect of 1 year of age for most verbal cognitive ability subtests in Grades 4–6. A higher ratio might be expected for more curriculum-related areas such as reading tests. Analysis of a representative sample of 4257 Grade 1 and 2 children in Tasmanian government schools (which use relatively strict age assignment to grades) for three subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test—Revised (WRMTR): Word Identification, Word Attack, and Passage Comprehension, showed that the grade effect is about twice the age effect. This data shows that using age-based norms instead of grade-based norms for reading and other verbal ability tests may produce bias in the early school years. Psychologists should thus be primarily concerned with children's educational history, as once children have entered school other developmental factors indexed by age have less influence on children's verbal performance.

Effects of Two Tutoring Programs on the English Reading Development of Spanish-English Bilingual Students

Spanish-dominant bilingual students in grades 2-5 were tutored 3 times per week for 40 minutes over 10 weeks, using 2 English reading interventions. Tutoring took place from February through April of 1 school year. One, Read Well, combined systematic phonics instruction with practice in decodable text, and the other, a revised version of Read Naturally, consisted of repeated reading, with contextualized vocabulary and comprehension instruction. The progress of tutored students (n = 51) was compared to that of nontutored classmates (n = 42) using subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised. Students who received systematic phonics instruction made significant progress in word identification but not in word attack or passage comprehension. There were no significant effects for students in the repeated reading condition.

Pleiotropic Effects of a Chromosome 3 Locus on Speech-Sound Disorder and Reading

Speech-sound disorder (SSD) is a complex behavioral disorder characterized by speech-sound production errors associated with deficits in articulation, phonological processes, and cognitive linguistic processes. SSD is prevalent in childhood and is comorbid with disorders of language, spelling, and reading disability, or dyslexia. Previous research suggests that developmental problems in domains associated with speech and language acquisition place a child at risk for dyslexia. Recent genetic studies have identified several candidate regions for dyslexia, including one on chromosome 3 segregating in a large Finnish pedigree. To explore common genetic influences on SSD and reading, we examined linkage for several quantitative traits to markers in the pericentrometric region of chromosome 3 in 77 families ascertained through a child with SSD. The quantitative scores measured several processes underlying speech-sound production, including phonological memory, phonological representation, articulation, receptive and expressive vocabulary, and reading decoding and comprehension skills. Model-free linkage analysis was followed by identification of sib pairs with linkage and construction of core shared haplotypes. In our multipoint analyses, measures of phonological memory demonstrated the strongest linkage (marker D3S2465, P=5.6 x 10(-5), and marker D3S3716, P=6.8 x 10(-4)). Tests for single-word decoding also demonstrated linkage (real word reading: marker D3S2465, P=.004; nonsense word reading: marker D3S1595, P=.005). The minimum shared haplotype in sib pairs with similar trait values spans 4.9 cM and is bounded by markers D3S3049 and D3S3045. Our results suggest that domains common to SSD and dyslexia are pleiotropically influenced by a putative quantitative trait locus on chromosome 3.

Curriculum Influences on Growth in Early Reading Fluency for Students with Academic and Behavioral Risks

This study applied an early screening approach to determine the risk status of children in five urban schools and monitor their patterns of reading growth over 3 years. A majority of students were from culturally diverse and low-SES backgrounds.Two validated instruments were used for determining (a) academic risk (the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills [DIBELS]; Good et al., 1998) and (b) behavioral risk ( Systematic Screening for Behavior Disorders [SSBD]; Walker &amp; Severson, 1992, or Early Screening Project; Walker, Severson, &amp; Feil, 1995). DIBELS data for 383 students were used to determine the characteristics and effectiveness of reading curriculum reforms for students in kindergarten through second grade. Results indicated that students with a single risk factor (academic or behavioral) progressed more slowly than the general population in the participating schools.The students with behavioral risks, however, made better progress, becoming more fluent readers than the students with academic risks. Students with both academic and behavioral risks made the least progress. The Reading Mastery curriculum (Reading Mastery, 1995) produced better growth in reading fluency than did Success for All (Success for All, 1999) or the literature-based curriculum. It also produced better growth for students with academic, behavioral, or both risk factors.The Success for All curriculum produced less growth compared to the Reading Mastery curriculum but was superior to the literature-based curriculum. Implications are discussed.