by Beth Morris
ABD, University of Virginia

This paper is copyrighted to Beth Morris; published with her permission. 2004.

The observational checklists that follow this paper are an evaluation tool for administrators to use when observing teachers teaching reading.  This paper also contains information about conducting preconferences, observations and post conferences.  I created the first set of checklists for a class.  The purpose was to provide something to support administrators who have little or no training in reading education as they observe teachers.  In order to support the teachers, they need support themselves.  How can an administrator know if a teacher is doing a good job?  Or what type of support they need if they are struggling?  Hopefully, these checklists and the information provided about observations will help an administrator to support her teachers…

Download the whole paper (PDF file)

by Steven A. Stahl
American Educator, Spring 2003, pp. 18-19.

We live in a sea of words. Most of these words are known to us, either as very familiar or at least as somewhat familiar. Ordinarily, when we encounter a word we don’t know, we skip it, especially if the word is not needed to make sense of what we are reading (Stahl, 1991). But we remember something about the words that we skip. This something could be where we saw it, something about the context where it appeared, or some other aspect. This information is in memory, but the memory is not strong enough to be accessible to our conscious mind. As we encounter a word repeatedly, more and more information accumulates about that word until we have a vague notion of what it “means.” As we get more information, we are able to define that word. In fact, McKeown, Beck, Omanson, and Pople (1985) found that while four encounters with a word did not reliably improve reading comprehension, 12 encounters did.

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BY REBECCA KARAFFA

This paper was written in fulfillment of assignments for EDIS 770. Published with permission of Rebecca Karaffa.

One of my professional goals as a support staff person is to assist classroom teachers to accelerate the reading progress of their students.  Supporting the instruction of content is essential in my planning, since I am not always able to schedule my student sessions during the literacy block.  My 18-year lower primary teaching career has made me very familiar with integration of curriculum and differentiation of instruction.  Both formal and informal assessments led me to plan activities that addressed multiple intelligences and tied together concepts with the goal of advancing literacy skills among my students.

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by CATHERINE ILIAN

This paper was written in fulfillment of an assignment for EDIS 770.

I am a former skeptic, I must admit.  Before I started the reading program, I taught practical English in High school and also psychology.  Being a long-term substitute, and new to education, I meekly agreed with the old teacherís plans: to plow ahead with the difficult ninth grade literature textbook-in spite of the fact that the kids could barely read five out of ten words correctly in this textbook. Class consisted of reading out loud to them the required literature on the SOLs, letting them read out loud at easy parts.  The special ed teacher and I commiserated every day on their lack of motivation and slowness with reading.  Now after being in the reading program for only a few months, and still a rookie, I berate my own stupidity at insisting that the kids must read the ninth grade literature book.  No wonder they were so disruptive!  I would be bored and disruptive, too, if forced to read something I only read with 50% accuracy out loud.  If I had to do it again, I would find literature that was written at their level, or easier works by the same author to cover the themes of the SOL in ninth grade.  I would find simpler versions of the Shakespeare story. 

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http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring2003/index.html

Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge--of Words and the World (pdf file, 395k)
Scientific Insights into the Fourth-Grade Slump and Stagnant Reading Comprehension
By E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

With a scientific consensus established on how best to teach decoding, we’ve reached the next reading frontier: increasing reading comprehension. Among poor children, low comprehension is ruining their chances for academic success. Among all children, comprehension scores are stagnant. Convincing research tells us that key to bothproblems is to systematically build children’s vocabulary, fluency, and domain knowledge.

http://65.110.81.56/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring_sum98/cunningham.pdf

Reading has cognitive consequences that extend beyond its immediate task of
lifting meaning from a particular passage.  Furthermore, these consequences
are reciprocal and exponential in character.  Accumulating over time--and
spiraling upward or downward--they carry profound implications for a wide
range of cognitive capabilities.

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring_sum98/moats.pdf

As it has become increasingly apparent that substantial numbers of children
are failing to become skilled readers, a consensus is emerging among reading
researchers, practitioners, and policy makers concerning the critical role
that decoding plays in the reading process (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

By Nell K. Duke, V. Susan Bennett-Armistead, and Ebony M. Roberts

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring2003/void.html

Filling the Great Void
Why We Should Bring Nonfiction into the Early-Grade Classroom

Nell K. Duke, V. Susan Bennett-Armistead, and Ebony M. Roberts

Data from several different sources converge on the point that informational text is scarce in primary-grade classrooms. One such source of data is the analyses of the text genres represented in basal reading series. The proportions we found reported in studies within the last two decades ranged
from a high of 33.8 percent factual articles in eight basal reading series for grade 2 (Schmidt, Caul, Byers, & Buchman, 1984) to a low of 12 percent nonfiction in five basal reading series for grade 1 (Hoffman et al., 1994).
In the most recent analysis of which we are aware, Moss and Newton (1998) examined six grade-2 basal reading series, copyright 1995 to 1997. They found a mean of 16 percent of selections that could be classified as informational literature.

Public release date: 23-Jan-2004, Johns-Hopkins University

Calling for an end to ideological debates on teaching English language
learners to read, a new report analyzing more than three decades of
research finds that bilingual education programs produce higher levels of
student achievement in reading than English-only approaches for this
rapidly growing population.

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