Michael W. Kibby

What Will Be the Demands of Literacy in the Workplace in the Next Millennium

In this “RRQ Snippet,” the authors discuss their ideas about the changing demands for todays—and tomorrows—literate workforce.

Intersentential Processes in Reading Comprehension.

Mature readers were given cloze tests on two paragraphs of varying difficulty presented in three formats: regular, the paragraph as the author wrote it (with cloze deletions); scrambled, the same paragraph and deletions, but the sentences were presented in scrambled order; and isolated, in which each sentence was read in isolation. No significant differences between the regular and scrambled formats were found. Isolated performance was significantly lower than regular, but by only 10 to 1570. Performance in the isolated format indicated acceptable comprehension. The results served as a basis for examining the importance and function of intersentential processes in comprehension. Conclusions about cloze as a measure of reading comprehension were also offered.

The Relative Importance of Reliance on Intraword Characteristics and Interword Constraints for Beginning Reading Achievement.

AbstractThis study investigated the relative importance of use of intraword characteristics and interword relationships for beginning reading achievement. The model for statistical analysis was multivariate multiple regression. Vocabulary and comprehension achievement were dependent variables; IQ was a control variable; using oral reading error analysis, reliance on intraword characteristics was represented by a Graphic Similarity Index and a Sound Similarity Index, and reliance on interword relationships was represented by a Grammatical Relationships Index. The results support the contention that dependence on within-word characteristics is more important for beginning reading success than is reliance on between-word analysis. The findings are related to two contrasting theories of reading instruction.

Contextual vocabulary acquisition as computational philosophy and as philosophical computation

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for an unknown word in a text by reasoning from textual clues, prior knowledge, and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. Published strategies for CVA vaguely and unhelpfully tell the reader to ‘guess’. Artificial intelligence algorithms for CVA can fill in the details that replace ‘guessing’ by ‘computing’; these details can then be converted to a curriculum that can be taught to students to improve their reading comprehension. Such algorithms also suggest a way out of the Chinese Room and show how holistic semantics can withstand certain objections. † This paper is based in part on a talk given by Rapaport at the North American Computing and Philosophy Conference (NA-CAP 2006), Rensselaer Polytechnic University, August 2006. In this paper, ‘I’, ‘my’, etc. refer to Rapaport, and ‘we’, ‘our’, etc. usually refer to Rapaport and Kibby.

The Proper Study of Readability: A Reaction to Carver's "Measuring Prose Difficulty Using the Rauding Scale".

CHALLENGES THE VALIDITY of Carvers Rauding Scale on both theoretical and procedural grounds. Although an interesting and possibly relevant technique, the Rauding Scale has not been demonstrated well in Carvers study. Although vocabulary and style are considered in the Rauding Scale, Carver advances this scale as the only technique that 1) assesses the reading difficulty of material as reflected by the idea or concept difficulty of the material and 2) is useful in revising written material. No theoretical rationale is provided for idea or concept difficulty. The construction and content of the Rauding Scale are challenged because the actual reading difficulty of the passages are in question. Procedurally, all 3 of Carvers reliability and validity studies are challenged as flawed by poor conceptualization, inadequate sampling, poor control, skimpy or inaccurate interpretations of data.

Why Is the School Psychologist Involved in the Evaluation of Struggling Readers

This piece addresses the role of the school psychologist in the evaluation of children experiencing significant difficulties in reading. It is written from my perspective as a university reading clinic director who has spent more than 40 years providing reading diagnostic and reading re-mediation services to struggling readers and their families and to teaching PhD students and EdM Reading Specialist majors diagnostic and re-mediation theory and methodology. Interestingly, School Psychology: A Blueprint for Training and Practice III (Blueprint III) states in the opening paragraphs that ‘‘reading difficulties continue to be the most frequent reason students are referred to school psychologists’’ (National Association of School Psychologists, 2007, p. 9). As a matter of fact, however, school psychologists do not have to be experienced teachers; moreover, Blueprint III provides no other information or recommendations about reading or children encountering difficulties in reading and does not call for school psychologists to gain expertise in reading as part of their graduate education. One can only wonder why it is that a child thought or known to have difficulty reading would ever be referred to a school psychologist in the first place. To address the issue of the school psychologist’s role in reading evaluation and reading re-mediation, I address first the topics of what a reading diagnosis is and what should be expected as the result of the diagnostic evaluation of a child for whom reading has been a difficult task. Before describing the goals, details, and outcomes of a reading diagnosis, a brief argument of why diagnosis is important is presented, followed by the rationale for the term reading re-mediation.

The Effects of Certain Instructional Conditions and Response Modes on Initial Word Learning.

TWO HUNDRED FORTY-FOUR beginning first graders were taught two sets of six words by standardized teaching methods. Both sets were taught in 3 instructional conditions: 1) correction-correct responses were acknowledged and incorrect responses corrected 2) criterion learning-continued instruction and practice with words not learned in the allotted time and 3) regular-no correction or extended instruction. In each instructional condition, students practiced reading the words in one of two response modes: 1) selection-a multiple choice situation in which the child selected the word pronounced by the teacher and 2) production-each word was read orally by the student. Although correction increased performance on the practice trials, it did not increase the actual number of words learned or retained. Providing additional instruction and practice did not increase learning or retention. Therefore, simply increasing the amount of instructional time of one lesson will not facilitate the acquisition of sight words or reading skills of first graders who have difficulty learning to read words. Words taught by a phonic method were better retained when practice was provided in the production mode than in the selection mode. Thus, requiring students to verbalize words taught by a phonic method appears to facilitate retention.

Word Synthesis and Beginning Reading Achievement

AbstractThis study examines the relation of word synthesis ability to first grade reading achievement after eliminating I.Q. and reader strategy (use of phonics and grammatical relations). Word synthesis was measured by the proportion correct on a self-devised test using visual stimuli and the mean reaction time to correct responses. Reading strategy was identified by the psycholinguistic procedures of the Reading Miscue Inventory. The subjects were ninety-eight first graders. Proportion correct in word synthesis was significantly related to reading achievement. This association remained stable regardless of reading strategy. It was concluded that this result may be due to the role of word synthesis in phonics and the possibility that most beginning readers make some minimal use of phonics.