John W. Miller

A Validation Study of the Inventory of Teacher Knowledge of Reading

The reliability and construct validity of an instrument designed to measure teacher knowledge of reading are examined. The instrument was administered to a sample of 304 elementary school teachers. Results revealed significant differences among teachers grouped by number of years of teaching experience, degree level, number of reading courses, and grade level taught. All differences were interpreted as supporting the construct validity of the instrument. Internal consistency reliability was estimated at .91.

Disabled readers: their intellectual and perceptual capacities at differing ages.

To investigate the multiple relationships between selected measures of intelligence and perception and reading achievement a group of young, poor readers (MCA = 8.4 yr.) and a group of older, poor readers (MCA = 11.2 yr.) were given the Gates-MacGinitie Achievement Test, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Slosson Intelligence Test, Spatial Orientation Memory Test, and Auditory Discrimination Test. The combination of the four predictor variables accounted for a significant amount of the variance in reading vocabulary and comprehension for younger and older poor readers. Greater variance was accounted for in the reading achievement of younger students than of older students. Perceptual abilities related more strongly for younger students, while intelligence related more strongly for older students. Questions are raised about the validity of using expectancy formulae with younger disabled readers and the “learning disabilities” approach with older disabled readers.

Contextual Sensitivity in Beginning Readers

available for use in recognizing a word that appears in written discourse. The sources are the graphic features of the word and the context in which the word appears. The graphic cues are helpful in word recognition to the degree that the reader is able to discriminate between the features that make up words and letters and the degree to which the reader has learned the rules that match the sounds of his or her language to its accompanying written code. Similarly, the contextual cues may be helpful in word recognition to the degree that the reader is aware of the syntactic and the semantic constraints imposed on a word in a given position in a sentence by the words in the context surrounding that position. The purpose of the research reported here is to study the development of sensitivity to contextual constraints among children learning to read. Several lines of research indicate that adult readers are aware of the contextual constraints in sentences. Levin and Kaplan (1) report that the eye-voice span, the distance that the eyes are ahead of the. voice in oral reading, extends to the phrase boundaries of sentences for adults and children down