Lawrence J. O'Shea

The Effects of Repeated Readings and Attentional Cues on Reading Fluency and Comprehension.

The failure of some researchers to find improved reading comprehension with increased fluency may result from the assumption that readers automatically shift attention to comprehension when fluency is established. Research on cuing readers to a purpose in reading suggests that a simple cue about comprehension may be sufficient to prompt this attentional shift. In this study, the effects of repeated readings and attentional cues on measures of reading fluency and comprehension were examined. Thirty third graders read separate passages one, three, and seven times following cues to attend to either reading rate or meaning. After the final reading of each passage, the students retold as much of the story as they could. Fluency and proportion of story propositions retold were analyzed in repeated measures analyses of variance. Significant main effects for both repeated readings and attentional cues were obtained on both dependent measures. Thus, both fluency and comprehension increased as the number of repeated readings increased. In addition, readers cued to fluency read faster but comprehended less than those cued to comprehension. These results suggest that increasing fluency is a less efficient means of improving comprehension than presenting cues about comprehension.

The Effects of Segmenting Written Discourse on the Reading Comprehension of Low- and High-Performance Readers.

THIS STUDY EXAMINED the efficacy of segmenting written discourse into meaningful phrases to improve comprehension scores on a maze task. Randomly selected firstthrough third-grade children from a city in central Pennsylvania were categorized as low or high performance based on measures of reading speed and accuracy. Subjects completed two maze tasks at the third-grade reading level: one segmented and one standard typographic passage. An a priori hypothesis of an interaction between performance level and passage type was found to be nonsignificant, although the main effects for performance level and passage type were significant. These results indicate that segmenting sentences into meaningful units aids both highand low-performance readers. Canonical correlation analysis showed that the effect of segmenting text was especially pronounced for slow but accurate readers.

Collaboration and School Reform: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective.

Collaboration and school reform are current social—political issues that affect many individuals and school districts. In this series summary, the authors examine national goals, federal legislation, and local reform practices. A twenty—first—century perspective predicting the integration of collaboration and school reform may help to guide future teaching, research, and/or service efforts. How families and professionals work together today will affect how we educate students during the next century.

Using Repeated Reading.

Support for the use of repeated reading is derived from the importance of fast and accurate word recognition. Samuels (1979) has described the benefits of repeated reading in relation to automaticity theory. Readers have two simultaneous tasks to perform in reading: recognizing words and deriving meaning. When a passage is difficult, readers focus most or all of their attention on decoding words they do not recognize. Consequently, little attention remains for identifying how meanings are related in the passage (e.g., main idea, inferences, supporting details, etc.).

The Regular Education Initiative in the U.S.: What Is Its Relevance to the Integration Movement in Australia?

A NEW THRUST for the integration of students with a mild disability has been initiated by special education scholars and Federal government officials in the U.S. The “regular education initiative” is based upon the assumption that mildly disabled students’ educational and social needs can be better served in regular education settings. Proponents of the regular education initiative are seeking “waivers for performance” that would allow school districts to experiment with alternative service delivery models and the allocation of resources without being Financially penalized under the current funding systems. Critics argue that the strength of the research base used to support REI is insufficient to warrant wholesale changes in current service delivery systems. They are sceptical of the argument that REI type programs can eliminate the effects of labeling by better integrating students who need supplemental educational resources. An analysis of the REI proposals and their conceptual relevance to the Austral...

What Have We Learned and Where Are We Headed? Issues in Collaboration and School Reform

The authors introduce the series. They pose key questions on collaboration and school reform related to our past knowledge and future endeavors regarding students with learning disabilities. The authors introduce series authors and summarize each manuscript.