Kristin Conradi

Tapping Technology's Potential to Motivate Readers.

Technology isn’t inherently motivational to students, but teachers can employ a variety of strategies that can harness technology to promote student engagement. In so doing, teachers can focus on students’ self-concept as well as their attitudes as particularly important levers of motivating students to engage in reading.

The Push for More Challenging Texts: An Analysis of Early Readers’ Rate, Accuracy, and Comprehension

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between the challenge level of text and early readers’ reading comprehension. This relationship was also examined with consideration to students’ word recognition accuracy and reading rate. Participants included 636 students, in Grades 1–3, in a southeastern state. Results suggest that students reading texts well above their actual grade levels, even with sufficient accuracy scores, scored significantly lower on comprehension than students reading texts at their actual grade level. This result also held regardless of students’ reading rates. Findings signal the importance of considering text level during instruction and suggest some caution is warranted when pushing students into texts well above their grade levels.

Explaining Variance in Comprehension for Students in a High-Poverty Setting

This study examined the contributions of decoding, language, spelling, and motivation to the reading comprehension of elementary school readers in a high-poverty setting. Specifically, the research questions addressed whether and how the influences of word reading efficiency, semantic knowledge, reading self-concept, and spelling on reading comprehension varied based on 2 different measures of comprehension. The sample included 52 elementary-age participants from 1 high-poverty school. Multiple regression analyses revealed that factors were related differently to comprehension depending on the measures used. Specifically, fluency accounted for most of the variance in silent reading comprehension but a smaller proportion of the variance in oral reading comprehension. For the oral reading comprehension measure, semantic knowledge was the most influential predictor.

Interpreting Reading Assessment Data Moving From Parts to Whole in a Testing Era

This article is designed to help teachers interpret reading assessment data from DIBELS beyond individual subtests to better support their students’ needs. While it is important to understand the individual subtest measures, it is more vital to understand how each fits into the larger picture of reading development. The underlying construct of each DIBELS subtest is unpacked, followed by a demonstration of how teachers can (a) interpret results and (b) design high-quality interventions around the reading constructs, rather than teaching to individual subtests. Two classroom examples are presented that were designed to illustrate realigned interpretation of assessment results.