Woodrow Trathen

The Selective Attention Strategy and Prose Learning

For more than a century, educators and psychologists have sought to understand how readers learn and recall text information. Early models of the learning process relied on almost mechanical explanations for how prose material was learned and recalled. For example, Frase (1969) described ways in which inserted questions might “shape” reading behaviors to promote greater learning. Thus, the reader was seen as passive and without any real input into the learning process. More recently, cognitive psychologists such as Anderson (1970), Brown (1980), and Flavell (1979) have proposed that readers are really active, strategic participants in the learning situation. This recent approach has encouraged prose learning researchers to investigate the types of strategies that learners employ in different contexts, particularly as they attempt to learn and recall information from long, expository texts.

Validating Craft Knowledge

This longitudinal study investigated childrens performance on several informal reading and spelling tasks. Students (n = 274) in a rural North Carolina county were assessed across grades 2 to 6 on the following measures: isolated word recognition (timed and untimed), oral reading accuracy, reading comprehension, reading rate, and spelling. Statistics (means and standard deviations) were reported for each measure each year. Overall, the results tended to support traditional performance criteria in reading diagnosis. Two findings that deserve further study were (1) word recognition–timed proved to be a good predictor of oral reading rate at each grade level (median r = .68), and (2) both oral and silent reading rates, after increasing steadily from grade 2 to 4, began to taper off between grades 4 and 6. This second finding is in contrast to previous reading-rate data reported by Hasbrouck and Tindal and by Taylor.

Preferences for Idioms: Restrictions Due to Lexicalization and Familiarity

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that preferences for figurative interpretations of common idioms depend on both lexicalization and the degree of familiarity of the phrases idiomatic meaning. Experiment I reported that native English speakers understood both high and low familiarity idioms as lexicalized units while nonnatives did not. Experiment 2 found that preferences for idiomatic interpretations depended on the degree of familiarity only when idioms were recognized as lexicalized units. It was concluded that both lexicalization and familiarity contribute to the likelihood of idiomatic preferences, while only lexicalization contributes significantly to the comprehension of idiomatic meanings.

The Role of Reading Rate in the Informal Assessment of Reading Ability

This article, which focuses on oral reading rate, reports findings from a large assessment study in rural North Carolina. Students in grades 2 to 6 were assessed on the following measures: isolated word recognition (timed and untimed); oral reading accuracy, reading rate, and reading comprehension. Overall, the results (1) support traditional “instructional-level” criteria in reading diagnosis (e.g., word recognition-timed = 75%; oral reading accuracy = 95%); (2) provide tentative oral reading rate minimums for each grade level, 2 through 6; and (3) suggest that a word recognition-in-isolation measure, if timed (½ second), is an excellent predictor of oral reading rate or fluency. Practical implications accompany each of these findings.

Using e‐mail to create pedagogical dialogue in teacher education

Abstract Dialogue has long been a central tool for literacy instruction. This paper reports on a project that engaged students in pedagogical e‐mail dialogue. All students were enrolled in a content area reading methods course at one of six geographically diverse universities: Appalachian State University, Arizona State University, the University of Georgia, the University of Utah, the University of Virginia, and Utah State University. “Read‐L” (a listserv) was created as an electronic dialogue community. The primary data source for this research was the slightly over 600 messages submitted by approximately 150 students during a single semester. Two extensive student‐initiated dialogues were selected from these messages and analyzed using Burbules’ (1993) dimensions of pedagogical dialogue and his criteria for educationally beneficial and detrimental forms. Results of these analyses are presented and implications for educational practice, specifically the use of e‐mail as a dialogue tool, are discussed.

A professional development initiative for developing approaches to vocabulary instruction with secondary mathematics, art, science, and english teachers

Abstract During a yearlong collaborative effort to enhance vocabulary instruction in secondary classrooms, high school teachers and university faculty developed and implemented a variety of approaches to support students in building rich representations of word meanings as well as an understanding of word features such as roots, affixes, and parts of speech. This article describes those approaches and provides specific examples.

The Adventures of Lead Commander: An Environmental Education Program To Prevent Lead Poisoning in Young Children.

Abstract This study examined the effectiveness of a family-based environmental education program in lowering young childrens exposure to lead and whether a lead-lowering intervention was associated with changes in behavioral functioning. Thirty preschool-age children were divided into treatment and comparison groups, with the treatment group given an environmental education program on preventing lead exposure. This prevention program included preschool materials/activities and parent/family materials/activities. Prior to treatment, and again 9 months later, both groups had hair analysis for lead levels and ratings of problem behavior. Posttest hair-lead levels and teacher and parent ratings of nonadaptive behavior were significantly lower for the treatment group than for the comparison group. Although limited by the modest sample size, the results suggest that lead exposure degrades behavioral performance in young children and that family-based environmental education programs can reduce young childrens...

Three DIBELS Tasks vs. Three Informal Reading/Spelling Tasks: A Comparison of Predictive Validity

Within a developmental framework, this study compared the predictive validity of three DIBELS tasks (phoneme segmentation fluency [PSF], nonsense word fluency [NWF], and oral reading fluency [ORF]) with that of three alternative tasks drawn from the field of reading (phonemic spelling [phSPEL], word recognition-timed [WR-t], and graded passage reading [grPASS), an oral reading fluency measure). Two cohorts of students (n = 319) were assessed with the aforementioned tasks multiple times across a four-year period—middle of kindergarten through end of third grade. The results were clear and closely replicated in the two cohorts: (a) phSPEL (moderate) outperformed DIBELS PSF (weak to moderate) in predicting future orthographic-unit processing; (b) WR-t (very strong) outperformed DIBELS NWF (moderate) in predicting future oral reading fluency; and (c) DIBELS ORF and grPASS were equally good predictors (moderately strong) of future reading comprehension.

Using subjective and objective measures to predict level of reading fluency at the end of first grade

This study compared reading rate to reading fluency (as measured by a rating scale). After listening to first graders read short passages, we assigned an overall fluency rating (low, average, or high) to each reading. We then used predictive discriminant analyses to determine which of five measures—accuracy, rate (objective); accuracy, phrasing, pace (subjective)—would best predict our fluency ratings. The objective measure of rate and the subjective measure of phrasing were clearly the best predictors, classifying approximately 90% of the cases correctly. The results support the use of reading rate as a proxy for reading fluency in first grade.

The "Simple View," Instructional Level, and the Plight of Struggling Fifth-Sixth Grade Readers

ABSTRACT This study explored print-processing and vocabulary differences among a group of 5th- and 6th-grade students who had scored below the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test. Guided by the simple view of reading, we applied cut scores (low/high) to the students’ performance on print-processing and vocabulary tasks. The design allowed for the placement of students in 1 of 4 reader profiles: (a) high print processing/low vocabulary (25%), (b) high print processing/high vocabulary (14%), (c) low print processing/high vocabulary (14%), or (d) low print processing/low vocabulary (48%). An important finding was that 62% of the students could not read grade-level text with adequate accuracy and rate. In fact, many could not read comfortably a full level below their grade placement. We consider instructional implications.