Reading and Writing最新文献

Abstract

This article describes the development and administration of the Kindergarten-Second Grade (K-2) Writing Data-Based Decision Making (DBDM) Survey. The K-2 Writing DBDM Survey was developed to learn more about current DBDM practices specific to early writing. A total of 376 educational professionals (175 general education classroom teachers, 42 special education teachers, 118 speech-language pathologists, and 41 specialists (e.g., interventionists, coaches, educators supporting emergent bilinguals) who work with kindergarten, first, and/or second grade students in school settings in the United States participated in this survey study. Results include participant responses to 32 closed-ended items and 2 open-ended items covering five domains: (a) demographic information; (b) assessment(s) types, (c) administration procedures, (d) scoring procedures, and (e) information gathered. Descriptive and regression analyses were applied to summarize the survey results. Findings from this survey indicated that even with limited or no guidance, some educators within all groups of professionals surveyed are assessing students. However, ongoing improvements need to be made to prioritize writing upon school entry. These results remind us of the importance of partnership with educators to ensure accurate understanding of resources available for assessment, current areas of need, and how implementation can feasibly occur in the practice setting when developing and studying approaches to assessment.

Abstract

There is good evidence that high-quality instruction targeting reading-related skills in the classroom leads to gains in reading. However, considerably less is known about the possible efficacy of remote instruction. This study evaluated the efficacy of an interactive evidence-based language-rich literacy programme. 184 children were randomly allocated either to an 8-week remotely delivered language-rich literacy programme or to a wait-list control group. Children in the programme arm (n = 77 at analysis) completed 16-lessons remotely targeting vocabulary, phonemic awareness, reading, spelling, and narrative skills. Children in the wait-list arm (n = 58 at analysis) received business-as-usal from their schools. Children’s word reading accuracy and phonemic awareness was measured prior to and after the programme delivery period. Children receiving the literacy programme made significantly larger gains than the wait-list control group on reading accuracy (d = 0.32) and phonemic awareness (d = 0.63). This study demonstrates that a remotely-delivered literacy programme is effective. These findings have important implications for delivering specialist literacy instruction at scale.

The current research used the Proficient Academic Reader (PAR) framework to explore whether reading strategies, task awareness, and motivation predicted college students’ literacy skills over and above foundational skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary). Specifically, the current research investigated the unique contribution of the PAR constructs to literacy performance across two studies with two different samples of college students. In study one, college students completed assessments of bridging and elaborative reading strategies, task awareness, motivation (intrinsic motivation and competence beliefs), foundational skills, and literacy performance at the beginning of the semester. In study two, college students completed the same assessments at the beginning and end of a reading study and strategies course. Across both studies, students’ task awareness and motivation were significantly predictive of their literacy performance over and above foundational skills. Results from study one indicated that elaborative reading strategies uniquely predicted college students’ literacy performance. Results from study two indicated that elaborative strategies did not predict literacy performance at time one, however, they predicted literacy performance at time two. Exploratory analyses showed that the relation of motivation to literacy performance was moderated by students’ enrollment in developmental education courses. Additionally, motivation, elaborative reading strategies, and task awareness partially mediated the relation of foundational skills to literacy performance, suggesting modifications to the original PAR model. These findings support using the PAR framework to understand college reading readiness. Additional randomized controlled trial intervention studies are warranted to explore if factors of the PAR framework are malleable to classroom instruction.

Many initiatives have emphasized the importance of challenging students in text using readability formulas. Almost all formulas employ mean word frequency yet long-standing issues abound. Researchers question using a singular mean with a skewed variable like frequency. They also question the degree to which frequency pinpoints complex words, noting that infrequent words can be rare, but not rich (e.g., smock). Unfortunately, no studies have examined how often this phenomenon occurs. In fact, word frequency is a “black box” because we do not know the actual words represented at different frequency points. This study used a new frequency metric to analyze 249 texts designed for close reading. Texts averaged 640 words and were written for Grades 2–8. For each text, curves were compared by grade and type. Words at each point on the curve were identified and analyzed. Findings illustrated the curves of word frequency throughout a text and unpacked the actual words at different points along the curves. Regardless of grade or type, curves were nearly identical in shape. Curves were characterized by four frequency strata. At the lowest frequency level were the rich, rare words that advance learning. However, analyses showed that between 34 and 72% of the time these least frequent words were rare but not rich, a pattern that occurred more frequently in narrative texts. Findings also showed that narratives were characterized by one very rare word that could influence the mean word frequency. The study included a series of graphics illustrating the functions of words at different tiers and listing the words along the curves.

Abstract

Writing attitude, strategy use, and confidence surveys help educators understand how students perceive writing and cope with writing challenges in schools. The dimensions (i.e., constructs reflected by survey items) of these surveys have been studied in general students in the U.S., and we investigated how these surveys would reflect the dimensions in Grade 4 students taught in a largely Hispanic setting. We conducted factor analyses and measurement invariant analyses to examine the dimensions in each survey and dimension consistencies between male and female and Hispanic and Non-Hispanic students. We found that attitude and strategy use are both unidimensional, and confidence can be divided into confidences in convention, ideation, and self-regulation. Strict measurement invariance evidence suggested same dimensions between male and female and Hispanic and Non-Hispanic students. Therefore, researchers can interpret results from each survey similarly across male and female and Hispanic and Non-Hispanic students.

Derivational suffixes are known to play a crucial role in assigning stress to multi-syllabic words among native English speakers. However, it is unclear whether second language (L2) learners of English can effectively use derivational suffixes as stress cues in written words. To address this gap, we studied if native Chinese-speaking adults learning English as an L2 can use derivational cues to correctly assign lexical stress, and whether the frequency of these suffixes and their L2 language proficiency moderate this sensitivity. Utilizing a written stress assignment and a stress production task, participants saw a series of written stems and their derived forms and were asked to either choose a syllable to assign the stress (Experiment 1) or read it aloud (Experiment 2). Results showed that L2 learners are sensitive to derivational cues to lexical stress in English. Moreover, the strength of this sensitivity is dependent upon the suffix class, frequency, and L2 language proficiency. Specifically, in both experiments, participants made more correct stress shifts in derived forms with high compared to low nonneutral suffix frequency; however, it did not differ between high and low neutral suffix frequency. In addition, as participants’ English proficiency increased, their correct stress shifts increased significantly greater in those derived nonwords with nonneutral than neutral suffixes in the stress assignment task. These findings make a significant contribution to the limited literature on L2 learners' sensitivity to morpho-orthographic cues to lexical stress and support the proposed statistical learning mechanism, that is, L2 learners can implicitly learn statistical regularities from linguistic materials.

Mind wandering occurs when a reader’s thoughts are unrelated to the text’s ideas. We examined the relation between mind wandering and readers’ memory for text. More specifically, we assessed whether mind wandering inhibits the reader’s development of the situation model and thus their ability to identify and recall the text’s most central ideas. Undergraduate participants (M = 18.92 years; SD = 1.32) read and recalled three expository passages. Participants responded to intermittent probes to report mind wandering frequency. We examined how mind wandering impacted the readers’ situation model, indicated by the proportion of central and peripheral ideas recalled. Using path analysis models, we found that mind wandering negatively predicted the recall of central, but not peripheral, ideas. The effect of mind wandering on the recall of central ideas was not explained by working memory span (measured by WAIS-IV digit span backward and letter-number sequencing), word reading skill (measured by Letter-Word Identification and Word Attack), or general reading comprehension skill (measured by the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test). These results indicate that mind wandering hinders the recognition and recall of a text’s most central ideas and suggest that mind wandering impacts the development of a coherent situation model. This effect seems to be independent of working memory, word reading, and general reading comprehension skill. Future studies should test approaches to decrease mind wandering among adult readers.

The understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie written composition requires analysis of moment-by-moment fluctuation in the rate of output that go beyond traditional approaches to writing time-course analysis based on, for example, counting pauses. This special issue includes 10 papers that provide important new tools and methods for extracting and analyzing writing timecourse data that go beyond traditional approaches. The papers in this special issue divide into three groups: papers that describe methods for capturing and coding writing timecourse data from writers producing text either by hand or by keyboard, papers that describe new statistical approaches to describing and drawing inferences from these data, and papers that focus on analysis of how a text develops over time as the writer makes changes to what they have already written.