Reading Skills In Grade Research Articles

Developmental profiles of task-avoidant behaviour and reading skills in Grades 1 and 2

A latent profile analysis approach was used to examine the developmental profiles of task-avoidant behaviour and reading skills in Grades 1 and 2, as well as their antecedents in kindergarten. The participants in this study were 448 children. Four different developmental profiles of task-avoidant behaviour and reading skills were identified. Our results showed that task-avoidant behaviour and reading problems do not coincide for all children. Parents' educational level differentiated between the profile groups. Comparisons of kindergarten skills between the groups showed that social competence skills in kindergarten helped to differentiate between the profile groups with varying levels of task-avoidance, whereas pre-reading skills predicted reading fluency. The heterogeneity of developmental profiles of task-avoidant behaviour and reading skills should be taken into account in future studies examining the relationship between these variables.

South African teacher proles and emerging teacher factors: €The picture painted by PIRLS 2006

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessment is an international comparative study of reading skills of Grade Four learners. South Africa’s "rst participation in the study took place in the 2006 cycle (Mullis et al., 2007), with repeat participation planned to take place for PIRLS 2011. PIRLS 2006 results pointed to serious issues of under achievement among South African Grade Four learners, resulting in the adoption of the National Reading Strategy (Department of Education,2008) and the Foundations for Learning Campaign. While some time has passed since the release of the PIRLS 2006 results, participation in PIRLS 2011 would highlight trends and possible progress made since the PIRLS 2006 study. !is paper reports on the analysis of the Grade Four learner achievement in the PIRLS 2006 assessment into the teacher characteristics, use of resources and instructional practices and analyses of the PIRLS 2006 Teacher Questionnaire data. The main findings outlined by this paper reflects the need for teachers’ continued professional development at Intermediate Phase, the need to employ strategies to retain young teachers and the importance of making available good quality reading materials to schools.

Troubles d’acquisition de la lecture en cours élémentaire : facteurs cognitifs, sociaux et comportementaux dans un échantillon de 1062 enfants

Background Reading impairment is the major learning disability in children. While research on illiteracy has mainly been conducted from a sociological perspective, research on dyslexia has typically been studied from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Studies that jointly investigate sociological, behavioral and cognitive factors in predicting reading outcome are rare and limited to English-speaking populations. The goal of the present study was to screen second grade children with reading impairment in French urban elementary schools and to pin down the factors that explain the various facets of reading failure and success. Methods A total of 1062 children from 20 different schools in the city of Paris participated in the study. Different aspects of reading were assessed individually for children with a suspected impairment in reading acquisition. Subsequently, 131 poor readers and 50 typically developing readers were matched for sex, age, and school. For these children, medical, cognitive, behavioral and individual socioeconomic data were obtained. Group differences were examined and multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine how much variance in reading was explained by the various variables. Results The prevalence of poor reading skills in grade 2 was highly influenced by neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) (ranging from 3.3% in high SES to 20.5% in low SES areas). Among the SES variables, employment of the father was a significant predictor of poor reading. Among the cognitive variables, phonological awareness and rapid naming were the most significant factors, much more than verbal or nonverbal intelligence. Among the behavioral variables, attention was an important factor but not externalized symptoms. Multiple regression analyses showed that reading outcome was best predicted by phonological awareness skills and attention deficits. Conclusion The majority of children with reading disability come from low SES areas. As in the English literature, the most robust predictor for reading impairment is phonological awareness, even when SES is taken into account. In addition, attention deficits seemed to aggravate reading impairments for children with weak phonological awareness skills. Successful early prevention should focus on reinforcing phonological awareness, recoding and attention skills.

Importance of speech production for phonological awareness and word decoding: The case of children with cerebral palsy

The goal of this longitudinal study was to investigate the precursors of early reading development in 52 children with cerebral palsy at kindergarten level in comparison to 65 children without disabilities. Word Decoding was measured to investigate early reading skills, while Phonological Awareness, Phonological Short-term Memory (STM), Speech Perception, Speech Production and Nonverbal Reasoning were considered reading precursors. Children with cerebral palsy lag behind on all reading precursors at the beginning of the second year of kindergarten. For the children without disabilities, early reading skills in Grade 1 were best predicted by Phonological Awareness and Phonological STM while Speech Production was the most important predictor of early reading success for the children with cerebral palsy, followed by Phonological Awareness and Speech Perception. Furthermore, for children with cerebral palsy, Speech Production appears to dominate reading development, as Speech Production measured at the beginning of the second year of kindergarten was strongly predictive of all other reading precursors measured at the end of the second year of kindergarten. The results of this study reveal that children with cerebral palsy with additional speech impairments are at risk for limited literacy development. Clinical implications are discussed.

Home literacy predictors of early reading development in children with cerebral palsy

The goal of the present 1-year long longitudinal study was to determine which home literacy variables were effective in stimulating early reading skills of children with cerebral palsy (CP) directly or indirectly via the reading precursors. Parents of 35 children with CP completed questionnaires regarding aspects of the home literacy environment (HLE). The reading precursors: Vocabulary, Syntactic skills and phonological awareness, i.e., Rhyme and Phonemic awareness, were assessed at the end of Kindergarten and the end of Grade 1, while the early reading skills Letter knowledge and Word recognition were assessed only at the end of Grade 1. Three HLE variables were found to be related to reading precursors and early reading skills: Parent literacy mediation, Word orientation and Story orientation activities during shared book reading. Path analyses showed that these three HLE variables were not directly related to early reading skills in Grade 1, but indirectly via the reading precursors, in particular phonological awareness.

The Development of Reading Skills in Children With English as a Second Language

One goal of this longitudinal study was to examine whether the predictors of reading skills in Grade 3 would differ between English as a second language (ESL) students and native English-speaking (L1) students. Phonological processing, syntactic awareness, memory, spelling, word reading, and lexical access skills were assessed in kindergarten and in Grade 3. The results indicated that in kindergarten, the ESL group had significantly lower scores on phonological processing, syntactic awareness, spelling, and memory for sentences tasks. However, in Grade 3, the ESL group performed in a similar way to the L1 group except on the syntactic awareness task. The combination of the two kindergarten measures, memory for sentences and Oral Cloze, and the combination of phonological processing and letter identification all contributed equally to predicting the L1 students' word-reading skills. However, for ESL students, letter identification and phonological processing made much larger contributions to predicting Grade 3 reading ability. Another goal of this study was to assess the procedures used to identify reading disability in the ESL and L1 student sample. Performance on two measures—letter identification and phonological awareness in kindergarten—predicted whether students would be classified in Grade 3 as at risk or having typical reading development for the ESL and L1 groups. The ESL children developed strong reading skills, and their status as ESL speakers did not put them at risk for reading difficulties in Grade 3. ESL students were not at any particular risk for reading difficulties after 4 years in Canadian schooling with an adequate balanced literacy program.

Reading in a disadvantaged high school : issues of accomplishment, assessment and accountability

Findings from a two-year project, which investigated the entry-level English reading skills of Grade 8 non-primary speakers of English, are presented. The article raises some theoretical and methodological issues related to reading development and assessment in schools. The generally poor reading skills of many learners entering high school raise questions about current classroom practices and disparities in literacy accomplishment in primary schools. By making our findings available to scholarly scrutiny, we wish to stimulate discussion on reading instruction and assessment in schools, and educational accountability, and so hope to encourage further research and discussion in this field.

Early phonological skills as a predictor of reading acquisition: a follow-up study from kindergarten to the middle of grade 2.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the power of early measures of phonological skills (phonemic awareness, rapid naming, short-term memory) in predicting later reading skills at various points of time. About 70 children were followed from the end of kindergarten to the middle of grade 2. Correlation analyses were performed as well as a linear growth curve analyses. In the traditional regression analysis, phonemic awareness in kindergarten explained about 27% of the variance in word reading six months later and about 9.5% of the variance at the end of grade 1. Even when prior level of reading skill was included in the predictive equation, a significant amount of variance was still explained by phonemic awareness. The other predictor variables did not explain any variance in word reading, and phonemic awareness did not predict any variance in reading skills in grade 2. When using sentence reading as the dependent variable, phonemic awareness explained about 16% of unique variance after six months, and about 13% of the variance in the middle of grade 2. Similarly, when employing growth curve analysis, phonemic awareness was the only phonological factor that accounted for significant variance in the word reading slope, explaining about 25% of its variance, whereas naming and short-term memory did not explain any unique variance. The lack of predictive power of phonemic awareness on the sentence b-slope is assumed to be caused by unreliable sentence scores in kindergarten.

Using pictographs to enhance recall of spoken medical instructions II

The first study in this series [Houts PS, Bachrach R, Witmer JT, Tringali CA, Bucher JA, Localio RA. Patient Educ. Couns. 1998;35:83–8] found that recall of spoken medical instructions averaged 14% but that, when pictographs (drawings representing the instructions) accompanied the spoken instructions and were present during recall, 85% of medical instructions were remembered correctly. Those findings suggested that spoken instructions plus pictographs may be a way to give people with low literacy skills access to medical information that is normally available only in written form. However, there were three important limitations to that study: (1) the subjects were literate and perhaps literate people remember pictograph meanings better than people with low literacy skills; (2) only short term recall was tested and, for medical information to be useful clinically, it must be remembered for significant periods of time and (3) a maximum of 50 instructions were shown in pictographs, whereas managing complex illnesses may require remembering several hundred instructions. This study addresses those limitations by investigating 4-week recall of 236 medical instructions accompanied by pictographs by people with low literacy skills. Subjects were 21 adult clients of an inner city job training program who had less than fifth grade reading skills. Results showed 85% mean correct recall of pictograph meanings immediately after training (range from 63 to 99%) and 71% after 4 weeks (range from 33 to 94%). These results indicate that people with low literacy skills can, with the help of pictographs, recall large amounts of medical information for significant periods of time. The impact of pictographs on symptom management and patient quality of life remains to be studied.

Factorial and Predictive Validity of First Graders' Scores on the Early Reading Screening Instrument

The factorial and predictive validity of the Early Reading Screening Instrument was examined for 105 first grade students. Analysis indicated that the test is unidimensional and can predict first grade reading skills at the end of the school year with at least a moderate amount of accuracy. A previous study indicated predictive validity coefficients of .66 and .73 when the criteria were word recognition and reading comprehension. The current study yielded predictive validity coefficients of .67 and .70 for these criteria.

Literacy and Performance on the Mini‐Mental State Examination

Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores are associated with age, education, and ethnicity. The objective of this research was to determine the relationship between MMSE and literacy. Cross-sectional. A Community population in Tucson, Arizona. Senior citizens in public assistance housing. MMSE score, reading level, and sociodemographic variables. A total of 214 subjects were tested. The mean age was 72.3 (+/- 8.01), and the mean education level was 10.3 years (range 0-20 years). Reading levels ranged from grade 0 (non-reader) to 8 (maximum value for the test used). with a mean of 4.8 (+/- 2.8). MMSE scores ranged from a mean of 21.9 (+/- 4.6) for non-readers to a mean of 28.0 (+/- 2.0) for subjects with > or = 8th grade reading skills. Multiple regression using reading level, education, age, and ethnicity as independent variables, and MMSE score as the dependent variable, showed the highest correlation was between MMSE and reading level (R2 = .265). Education level made only a small additional contribution; age and ethnicity did not enter the regression equation. Correlations between reading level and individual MMSE subsections were highest between reading level and MMSE language items (r = .499). The correlation between MMSE score and reading skills is stronger than the correlation with other sociodemographic variables. Proper interpretation of MMSE scores requires knowledge of patients' reading levels.

Differences in the Given Names of Good and Poor Readers

Of the many researchers who have investigated the psychological importance of names (Dion, 1985; Garwood, 1976; Hargreaves, Coleman, & Sluckin, 1983; McDavid & Harari, 1966), we are especially interested in those working on the relationship between student names and the school performance of those students. Busse and Seraydarian (1978), for example, found significant correlations between students' first name desirability, as rated by peers, and their school readiness, IQ, and school achievement. Harari and McDavid (1973) required teachers to evaluate fifth-grade essays previously rated by researchers as of equal quality. Writers were identified only by first name. The essays of authors whose names were associated with positive stereotypes were evaluated as being of a higher quality. One interpretation of these findings is that teachers' stereotypic attitudes influence the performance of the children under their care (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). However, the question remains where these stereotypes come from and whether names are partly responsible for these differences. Possible factors differentiating the names include likability (Hargreaves, Colman, & Sluckin, 1983), commonality (Dion, 1985), traditionality (Dion, 1983b), and socio-economic status (Zweigenhaft, 1977). The present study derives from another investigation (Segalowitz & Wagner, 1989) on reading skills in grade 9 students, where we noticed anecdotally that individuals unfamiliar with the subjects or their names could nonetheless consistently differentiate the list of given names of the remedial group from that of the controls. One could not predict the group membership of a single name with accuracy, but each list as a block could be accurately assigned. METHOD

Test of a Strategy to Increase the Predictability of First Grade Reading Skills from Letter Naming Abilities in Kindergarten

Two methods for capturing the letter naming skills of kindergarteners (N=35) were compared in power to predict Gates-McGinitie vocabulary and comprehension one year later. Traditionally, the predictor is the number of letters named correctly. The experimental method obtained a predictor set of factor scores obtained from quali tatively scored letter name responses. Both methods turned out essentially the same correlation coefficients.