Archive for Research

The report, "Parents' Reports of the School Readiness of Young Children from the National Household Education Surveys Program of 2007," has been released by the National Center for Education Statistics within the Institute of Education Sciences.

Some findings:

• Overall, 58% of children ages 3 to 6 and not yet in kindergarten were reported to be attending preschool or a daycare center in 2007.
• Regarding children’s school readiness skills, 93% had speech that was understandable to a stranger, 87% could hold a pencil with their fingers, 63% could count to 20 or higher, 60% could write their first name, 32% could recognize all letters of the alphabet, and 8% could read written words in books.
• Parents were asked about the frequency with which they or other family members read to the child in the past week. Fifty-five percent of children were read to every day, 28% were read to three or more times in the past week, 13% were read to once or twice in the past week, and 3% were not read to at all in the past week. For children who were read to in the past week, the mean daily reading time was about 21 minutes.
• A lower percentage of children residing in poor households (40%) were read to every day compared with children residing in nonpoor households (60%).

To read the pdf report online, visit the National Center for Education Statistics website.

Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library in Berea, Ohio, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland. Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policymakers and reading experts around the world, and within groups such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. For more, read this article in The New York Times online.

The National Center for Education Research within the Institute of Education Sciences today released the report on the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) initiative, an efficacy evaluation of several preschool curricula. The report, Effects of Preschool Curriculum Programs on School Readiness, provides individual results for each curriculum evaluated. Under the PCER initiative, twelve research teams were funded to implement and conduct research on 14 preschool curricula in a variety of settings serving predominantly low-income children under an experimental design. To see the report, visit this webpage of the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences.

Three Penn State College of Education faculty members are participating in a new $3 million research project aimed at studying the effectiveness of an online reading comprehension program being used in middle schools.

The new project, titled "Efficacy and Replication Research on the Intelligent Tutoring System for the Structure Strategy—Rural and Suburban Schools Grades 4, 5, 7, and 8," examines the Web-based reading program known as Intelligent Tutoring for the Structure Strategy (ITSS), which was developed by a College of Education research team on an earlier grant that ends this summer.

"Schools are struggling with the task of improving reading among students," said Bonnie J. F. Meyer, professor of educational psychology. "Some students fail to succeed in tasks such as identifying main ideas from expository text and giving cohesive and complete accounts of what they read because of how they read, rather than because they do not read." Meyer is principal investigator for the grant that ends in August and co-principal investigator for the newly funded efficacy grant. Read more at gantdaily.com.

The brain development of British children is being threatened by their failure to work with their hands in school and at home, according to a new report commissioned by the Ruskin Mill Educational Trust and reported on by Reuters. The report cited examples of 11-year-olds with deficits in certain areas of their cognitive development and a decline in the ability of young engineers and apprentices to conceptualize straightforward mechanical problems.

The report notes that many schools have dropped their woodworking, metalworking, crafting, music, and car mechanic classes. Furthermore, children spend much of their time outside of school playing computer games, creatng a "software instead of a screwdriver society."

For further information, read the full article.

Karla Young, a reading specialist in Murrieta, California, believes she has proof that girls are better readers. Most of her clients coming for help are boys. "Males and females are absolutely different in the way they process reading," she said.

Wrong, according to a three-year study that disputes the popular stereotype that women have superior language skills. Instead, a research team at the University of California Riverside (UCR) and the University of Florida, Gainesville, discovered that the key is greater individual rather than sex differences, most likely based on brain size. Read more in The Press-Enterprise online.

Student scores on state tests of reading and mathematics have risen since 2002, and achievement gaps between various groups of students have narrowed more often than they have widened, according to the most comprehensive and rigorous recent analysis of state test scores. These improvements have occurred during a period when the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), state education reforms, and local school improvement efforts have focused on raising test scores and narrowing achievement gaps.

The report, Has Student Achievement Increased Since 2002?: State Test Score Trends Through 2006-07, was released today, June 24, 2008, by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy (CEP). It analyzes state test data from all 50 states as well as trends through 2007 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the only federally administered assessment of reading and math achievement. While expanding on a similar report from last year, this study continues the focus on two main questions: whether reading and math achievement has increased since 2002 and whether achievement gaps between subgroups of students have narrowed. Read the press release and/or the report at the CEP website.

The English spelling system is 'absolutely, unspeakably awful'. That is the conclusion of new research that has found that children face 800 words by the age of 11 that hinder their reading because of the way they are spelled. Monkey, asparagus, spinach, caterpillar, dwarf, banana, handkerchief, pliers, soldiers, stomach, petal and telescope have all been included on the long list of words that baffle children because they contain letter combinations that are more commonly pronounced in a different way.

The words have all been identified as problematic for reading, as opposed to writing, because of their 'phonic unreliability', according to the study The Most Costly English Spellings. It was presented June 7, 2008, at the conference of the Spelling Society, held at Coventry University. Masha Bell, the literacy researcher who carried out the work, argued that there were 200 words on the list that could be improved by simply dropping 'surplus letters' such as the 'i' in friend or the 'u' in shoulder. Bell argued that the spelling system was a huge financial burden on schools and was to blame for poor literacy results compared with the rest of Europe. Read more on The Guardian website.

New research in eye movement and miscue analysis, a diagnostic tool to understand the reading process, shows that a reader doesn’t look at every letter or every word, making the “sound it out” strategy ineffective.

Koomi Kim, a new professor in language, literacy and culture at New Mexico State University’s College of Education, conducted a 2007 study with fellow researchers Marge Knox and Joel Brown from the University of Arizona in which the eye movement of young readers was recorded in order to discover what strategies are used while reading and how the reader constructs meaning.

“The myth is that we look at every single word and letter when we read,“ Kim said. “We are finding out that children look at about 70% of the text and adults look at about 60%.” Read about their study in The Las Cruces Sun-News online.

When it comes to school funding, too many states still provide the least to school districts serving students with the greatest needs, according to a report released January 17, 2008, by The Education Trust, an independent nonprofit organization whose mission is to make schools and colleges work for all young people they serve.

The seventh in a series of annual reports, “The Funding Gap” includes state-by-state analyses of funding trends from 1999 to 2005, comparing the resources available to school districts serving the highest percentages of low-income students and students of color to the resources available to districts serving the lowest percentages of such students.

For the first time, the report also compares funding available to school districts serving the high percentages of English language learners (ELL) to that available to districts serving the lowest percentages of ELL. Using data for the eight states with the highest percentages of English learners, the report finds that high-ELL districts generally receive less financial support than do districts with few or no ELL students. Read more about the report in a news release on The Education Trust website, where there is a link to the report in English and Spanish.

 The federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 rates schools based on how students perform on state standardized tests, and if too many children score poorly, the school is judged as failing. But how much is really the school’s fault?

A new study by the Educational Testing Service (ETS)—which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT—concludes that an awful lot of those low scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools. The study, “The Family: America’s Smallest School,” suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home, the level of poverty and government’s inadequate support for programs that could make a difference, like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave.

The ETS researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools and using just those four variables, were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy. Learn what those variables are by reading the article in The New York Times.

Maryland’s attempts to turn around its worst schools in the past several years have largely failed, according to a report by a Washington-based nonprofit education research group. Of the 76 schools labeled failing for at least five years, only 12, or 16% have improved significantly since 2004, the Center on Education Policy found. “Even in an advanced state like Maryland, that has tried to deal with these problems for a decade ... we just don't know what to do,” said Jack Jennings, president of CEP.

The most commonly tried solution—bringing in a turnaround specialist—usually doesn’t work, the report said. And a newer option, replacing the teaching staff, has caused disruption but hasn’t gotten results. Maryland is to be commended, Jennings said, for learning from what doesn’t work. The lesson for other states around the nation, he said, is “that we ought to be humble ... that it is a long, hard slog to bring about change, and it is something we just have to keep working at.” Read the article in The Baltimore Sun.

Screening tests widely used to identify children with reading problems are being misapplied, landing students in the wrong instructional level and delaying treatment for their true difficulties, says new research from National-Louis University and the University of Maryland. The study recommends more use of silent reading tests and limited use of oral tests, according to a summary appearing on Science Daily.

The full article, "Oral Reading Skills of Children with Oral Language (Word-Finding) Difficulties," authored by Diane J. German of National-Louis University and Rochelle S. Newman of the University of Maryland, is published in Volume 28, No. 5, Reading Psychology.

Nathan Jesmore may not enjoy the 7 a.m. practices, but there’s a lot about band he does like. The senior who attends Olathe East High School in Olathe, Kansas, said marching while playing his saxophone honed his concentration skills. “Band lays a lot of the foundation and teaches you a lot of the fundamentals about how to prepare for life,” said Jesmore, who has been in school bands since fifth grade. He may be on to something. A poll released this week suggests that being involved in music programs—from orchestra to garage band—could be linked to greater educational attainment and bigger paychecks. Also, a recent study by a University of Kansas music professor found a possible link between high-quality school music programs and higher math and reading scores. Read more in The Kansas City Star.

Educators and psychologists have long feared that children entering school with behavior problems were doomed to fall behind in the upper grades, writes Benedict Carey in The New York Times. But two new studies suggest that those fears are exaggerated.

In one study, being reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, an international team of researchers analyzed measures of social and intellectual development from more than 16,000 children and found that disruptive or antisocial behaviors in kindergarten did not correlate with academic results at the end of elementary school.

In the other study, being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that the brains of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder developed normally but more slowly in some areas than the brains of children without the disorder.

For further information, read the full article.

Investments in high-quality support programs for new educators yield a significant return on investment for teachers, schools, and students, according to a new study released by the New Teacher Center (NTC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The NTC's cost-benefit analysis demonstrates that high-quality induction programs are beneficial both because beginning teachers stay in greater numbers and because those who stay provide more effective instruction.

The NTC's analysis found that every $1.00 spent on high-quality teacher induction programs provides a return on investment of $1.66 after five years. The return on investment is primarily a result of enhanced student learning and reduced teacher turnover costs. The study underscores how teacher induction programs are critical to helping schools retain their best and brightest educators and develop a highly skilled teaching force. Further, the study adds to the research evidence that only comprehensive, high-quality teacher induction programs produce such desired impacts.

For further information, visit the New Teacher Center website.

Public Agenda and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality (NCCTQ) today released research indicating that new high school and middle school teachers, challenged by their teenaged students, are much more concerned about administrative support, more frustrated by student motivation and behavior, less likely to see teaching as a lifelong career choice, and less likely to believe that all students can achieve in school than new teachers in elementary schools.

The series, "Lessons Learned: New Teachers Talk About Their Jobs, Challenges and Long-Term Plans," is based on a nationwide survey of first-year teachers and aims to help leaders in education and government understand more about the quality of current teacher education and on-the-job support and mentoring for new teachers. "Issue No. 1: The Special Challenges of New Teachers in High Schools and Middle Schools" provides ample evidence that new teachers in middle and high school feel most vulnerable to challenging teaching conditions.

The full report and complete questionnaire are available online at the following page on the Public Agenda website.

The research will be discussed on a live webcast organized by NCCTQ on Thursday, October 11, 2007, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. (Eastern Time). Registration and more information about the Web discussion is available at this link.

Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system’s ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new Northwestern University study. Musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform a musical piece. They watch other musicians, read lips, and feel, hear and perform music, thus, engaging multi-sensory skills. As it turns out, the brain’s alteration from the multi-sensory process of music training enhances the same communication skills needed for speaking and reading, the study concludes. Read more about this research in this article from the scientistlive.com website.

When it comes to the racial achievement gap, principals or teachers can have a bigger impact on achievement in one year than whether a child is poor or from a single-parent home, according to a study by a Carnegie Mellon University professor. The study looked at 89 principals, 236 English teachers and 199 math teachers of students taking the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests in reading and math in March 2005. The study found that 62 principals had an effect on math results—ranging from scores 17.5 percent higher to those 37.2 percent lower. And 33 principals had an effect on reading—ranging from scores 15.66 percent higher to 35.65 percent lower. Among teachers, 148 had a significant impact in math scores and 90 did so in reading, both also by a wide range, positive and negative. Read more of this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

For the first few years of school, struggling readers can usually get by. The material is simple, the lessons are repeated often, and intensive remedial help is common. But for some of those pupils, reading ability starts a dramatic downhill slide right around 4th grade. While good readers are sponges for new words and grammar rules, slower readers are left further and further behind. Some never catch up. The National Institutes of Health has awarded $30 million over the next five years to research centers devoted to studying the issue, along with other questions related to reading disabilities. Read more about the study in this article from Education Week.

The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists. Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case. In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously. Read more about this research in this article from the BBC News.

One by one, Texas school districts are abandoning the bilingual education model that has been used to teach English to Spanish-speaking kids for the past 35 years. School administrators and teachers, backed by education researchers, have decided there is a better way. They call it dual language. Read more about the dual language approach in this article from The Dallas Morning News.

More than 20 years later, educational attainment is higher and felony arrests are lower for the alumni of a Chicago early intervention program for low-income children. The enrollees, now in their late 20s, are also more likely to have health insurance, according to a follow-up study released this week. Chicago’s Child-Parent Center program was—and is—more intense than Head Start, the main federal assistance program for low-income children and their families. Read more about the study in this article from The Kansas City Star.

Reading the written word may be mightier than lead poisoning, researchers in Baltimore reported. They found that avid reading, which stimulated cognitive reserve, helped fend off the cognition-draining effects of lead exposure in a group of smelter workers. Read more about this research in this article from the website MedPage Today.

Reading specialists have often pitted phonics against holistic word recognition and whole language approaches in the war over how to teach children to read. However, a new study by researchers at New York University shows that the three reading processes do not conflict, but, rather, work together to determine speed. Read more about this research in this article from ScienceDaily.

Most parents know that a good bedtime story can lull a child to sleep. And parents have long assumed that reading books with their child improves that child’s language skills and intellectual development. So it is surprising that, until recently, there was not much real proof of the widely held notion that joint book reading improves children’s communication skills. Now, a University of Kansas researcher has added to that evidence, showing that joint book reading is indeed associated with a child’s use of language and giving new details about how the variety of books and context of joint reading impacts linguistic development. Read more about this research in this article from the Kansas City infoZine website.

Not being able to read doesn’t just make it harder to navigate each day. Low literacy impairs people’s ability to obtain critical information about their health and can dramatically shorten their lives. A new study from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine shows that older people with inadequate health literacy had a 50 percent higher mortality rate over five years than people with adequate reading skills. Inadequate or low health literacy is defined as the inability to read and comprehend basic health-related materials such as prescription bottles, doctor appointment slips and hospital forms. Read more about this study on the website of Northwestern University.

 A new study of Chicago students suggests that the federal No Child Left Behind Act may indeed be leaving behind students at the far ends of the academic ability spectrum—the least able students and those who are gifted. The study by University of Chicago economists Derek A. Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach lends some empirical support to the common perception that schools are focusing on students in the middle—the so-called “bubble kids”—in order to boost scores on the state exams used to determine whether schools are meeting their proficiency targets. Read more of this article from Education Week.

It’s been a truism for decades that students’ learning slips during the summer, and that low-income children fall farther behind than their classmates, but no one had connected the longitudinal data dots to show just what the cumulative consequences of the summer slide might be. Until now. A recent study by sociology professor Karl L. Alexander and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore concludes that two-thirds of the reading achievement gap between 9th graders of low and high socioeconomic standing in Baltimore public schools can be traced to what they learned—or failed to learn—over their childhood summers. Read more of this article from Education Week.

Parents: Before you spring for that Nintendo Wii or other game system for your high schooler, consider this: Kids who spend a lot of time playing video games still socialize with friends, but don’t have a lot of time to spare to do their homework, according to a new University of Michigan study. Compared to non-gamers, kids who play video games spend 30% less time reading and 34% less time doing homework, the study showed. Read more of this article from the Detroit Free Press.

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Curriculum and Instruction, a peer-reviewed, electronic journal for articles focused on research, practice, and related issues relevant to teaching and learning in the preK–12 environment, now is available. The inaugural issue, Literacy: Best Practices in an Age of High-Stakes Assessment, features guest editor Terry S. Atkinson.

Policies on how teachers are evaluated, prepared, licensed and compensated—all factors that affect teaching quality—vary from state to state, according to a report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan group in Washington. “For the most part the current system is a mix of broken, counterproductive and anachronistic policies in need of an overhaul,” says the report, which summarizes each state’s laws and regulations affecting teachers. The report was released June 27. Read the article or the full report at the National Council on Teacher Quality website.

Children in families with low incomes, who attend schools where the minority population exceeds 75 percent of the student enrollment, under-perform in reading, even after accounting for the quality of the literacy instruction, literary experiences at home, gender, race and other variables, according to a new study. Read more about the study, by the FPG Child Development Institute and the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in this article from the Medical News Today website.

 Most states have seen dramatic improvements in math and reading test results since passage of the No Child Left Behind Act five years ago, but it’s too early to tell whether the gains can be tied directly to that landmark law, according to a new report released Tuesday (June 5). In one of the first studies of its kind, the Center on Education Policy (CEP), an advocate for public education, also found that more states are narrowing the achievement gap between minorities and white students, a major objective of NCLB. Read more at Stateline.org.

Increased school choice does little to enhance the educational opportunities of black pupils in England, a report suggests. A snapshot survey of black ethnic minority parents suggests they find it difficult to exercise choice and that this can lead to further segregation. The report by Runnymede Trust, a think tank devoted to research and advocacy on the subjects of ethnicity and cultural diversity, said many parents found the complexities in applying to selective schools off-putting. The government said £12m was being spent on advisers to help parents make the best choices for their child. Read more about school choice in England at BBC News.

The Education Department made big news last July when it released a long-awaited study that compared the test scores of children in more than 7,500 public and private schools. With most other things being equal, public school students often do better and sometimes a lot better than private-schoolers, the research found. But four days later, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings stood in the expansive hearing room of the House Education Committee to unveil a $100 million proposal to use taxpayer-funded vouchers to send public school students to private schools. Spellings called the study irrelevant, saying it was small and flawed. Other advocates of vouchers, such as Harvard University researcher Paul Peterson, agreed. Advocates of public schools, including teachers unions, say the Bush administration chose to ignore a study that didn’t support its agenda. Read more of this article from USA Today.

A recent study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the weekly magazine Science, takes teachers to task for spending too much time on basic reading and math skills and not enough on problem-solving, reasoning, science and social studies. It states that the typical child in the USA stands only a one-in-14 chance of having a consistently rich, supportive elementary school experience and suggests that U.S. education focuses too much on teacher qualifications and not enough on teachers being engaging and supportive. Read more of this article from USA Today.

Young children prone to ear infections and allergies appear at a higher risk of developing reading troubles in their elementary school years, according to research. Left unchecked, that can lead to learning disabilities, which typically result in disadvantages throughout life, from poorer overall physical and mental health, an increased likelihood of living with parents longer as adults, and lower incomes. Read more of this article from the Toronto Star.

Chronic reading problems and depression appear to be related, especially among low-income children, and the reading problems precede the depression. A new study done by researchers at the University of Delaware and West Chester University of Pennsylvania found that low-income children who take part in reading assistance programs in fifth grade are more depressed, anxious, and withdrawn than their peers, especially when they have chronic reading problems. Read more about this research in this article posted on the firstscience.com website.

Children are arriving for full–time primary school lessons weak in language, literacy and communication because teachers are spending too little time on the three Rs in the early years of their education, according to a report by inspectors published March 6 in England. The survey, by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, is the most comprehensive ever of three to five-year-olds in kindergarten. The report says that in one out of every three nursery and reception class settings standards in communication, language and literacy are lower than expected. The pupils—boys in particular—lack the confidence to speak or the ability to listen. Read more at The Independent online.

In a review of Louisa Moats’s essay “Whole Language Hi Jinx: How to Tell When ‘Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction’ Isn’t,” published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, former International Reading Association president Richard Allington notes,

“[Moats] exaggerates the findings of the National Reading Panel (NRP), especially the effects of systematic phonics on reading achievement. She also ignores research completed since the NRP report was issued seven years ago. Perhaps most disturbingly, she touts primarily commercial curriculum products distributed by her employer — products that have far fewer published studies of effectiveness than the products and methods she disparages.

“These flaws pervade the report’s subsequent discussion of what ‘scientifically based reading instruction’ should look like. In the end, the Fordham report works more effectively as promotional material for products and services offered by Moats and her employer, SoprisWest, than as a reliable guide to effective reading instruction.”.

An article on Moats’s report appears on the Reading Today Daily weblog. Allington’s review is published by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice. Full text can be found on the IRA website.

Research shows that small classes are beneficial during a child’s earliest school years. But there is little evidence that shows a correlation between class size and student achievement beyond the third grade, education researchers say. The issue is coming up with Gov. John Baldacci’s sweeping reorganization plan for Maine’s school system. One of the plan’s proposals calls for less state funding for teacher salaries, resulting in higher student-teacher ratios in grades 6 through 12. Parents and teachers still prefer small classes, despite the study results. Read about it at boston.com.

In a recent Fordham Foundation report, Whole Language High Jinks: How to Tell When Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction Isn’t, author Louisa Moats advises educators, parents, and concerned citizens to beware of “ineffective reading programs that hide under the ‘scientifically based’ banner” and suggests questions to ask to ensure a program is based on scientific evidence of effectiveness.

A highly-critical review of this article by former IRA president Richard Allington also appears in Reading Today Daily.

In today’s high-stakes accountability environment, schools trying to implement research-based strategies and curriculum face many hurdles. “The biggest one,” says a Houston area superintendent, “is the amount of research out there, locating what you need, and having the time and the staff to actually use research effectively.” Improving the knowledge base is critical, but educators need help adapting research findings to their own schools and classrooms. Read an article in the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory’s SEDL Letter to learn more about the challenges of applying high-quality research to improve schools.

For decades, a debate has simmered in the educational community over the best way to teach children how to read. Proponents of phonics, the “whole language and meaning” approach and other teaching methods long have battled for dominance, each insisting that theirs is the superior strategy. Now, a Florida State University researcher has entered the fray with a paper in the prestigious journal Science that says there is no one “best” method for teaching children to read. Read more of this article from physorg.com, a science news website. Read the paper in Science.

A 10-minute screening test to identify pre-school children who might be dyslexic has been developed by language experts at University College London. The test will be given to children age three and a half up, researchers said. What makes this test different is that it takes only 10 minutes—and it can be used before children are usually able to read, picking up any potential concerns before children have started full-time education. Other experts, however, urge caution because of the risk of “false alarms.” Read the story at the BBC website.

Teenagers who have significant problems reading appear to be much more likely than their peers to contemplate or attempt suicide, researchers reported Wednesday. In a 3-year study of 188 high school students, researchers found that those with poor reading abilities were nearly four times more likely than average readers to think about or attempt suicide. Findings of the study are summarized at the Scientific American website.

Considered by many to be the “gold standard for determining what works,” randomized trials have been difficult to apply in education studies for fear that a genuinely helpful intervention might be denied to some of the students who need it most. But an anti-poverty program recently implemented in Mexico offers an example of how such a test might be conducted in a different setting. Find this article in Education Week.

Intensive, explicit phonics instruction can “rewire” the brains of struggling readers, according to RMIT scientist Dr. Kerry Hempenstall. He cites brain imaging studies to support his contention that “60 hours of careful daily phonics teaching alters the way the brain responds to print. Inefficient right-hemisphere activity diminishes, and left-hemisphere activity increases.” As a result, “New MRI images now look much more like those of good readers [and] measured reading outcomes include increased fluency and comprehension.” Find his essay in The Age. (Australia)

German researchers say the learning disability dyslexia has a genetic component, and locating the responsible gene now opens up the way for treatment. Learn more in Deutsche Welle (Germany).

A recently completed review of research underscores the importance of recognizing and responding to critical early warning signs of learning difficulties in young children.The paper, “Recognition and Response: An Early Intervening System for Young Children at Risk for Learning Disabilities,” discusses the challenges for early educators and parents in addressing the learning difficulties of pre-school age children. It also advocates for a new systemic approach that can help early educators and parents ensure early school success for all children, including those at risk for learning difficulties. Find the paper at The University of North Carolina’s FPG Child Development Institute website.

A proposed U.S. law says research funded by taxes should be available online, but some scholarly journals worry that they could suffer financially if the law were enacted.

A new research report from the Hoover Institution offers evidence that evaluations by elementary school principals are better predictors of teacher effectiveness than are more “objective” criteria such as educational credentials or years on the job. Read about this study in Education Next.

Fifth graders in the United States have made academic progress over their first six years of learning, but gaps in their learning still exist, concludes the fifth in a series of reports from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. According to the study, released by the National Center for Education Statistics, poverty level and a mother’s level of education were among the strongest factors to have an impact on fifth graders’ achievement. View a copy of the report on the NCES website.

Almost half of the students who ultimately drop out of Philadelphia high schools can be identified as early as the sixth grade, according to research by the Philadelphia Education Fund in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University. The research found that a student displaying any one of four risk factors — attendance below 80 percent, poor behavior, a failing math grade, and a failing English grade — has, at best, only a 10 percent chance of graduating from high school on time, and only a 20 percent chance of graduating one year late.

“As early as the sixth grade, you can identify kids at risk and who won’t graduate unless something is done,” said Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins, the coauthor of the study along with Liza Herzog of the Philadelphia Education Fund. “They’re just starting to fall off track, and there’s time to pull them back in.”

For more on the study, see “A City At Risk: New Research Identifies Sixth-Grade ‘Risk Factors’ That Can Predict Future High School Dropouts in Philadelphia” at the Alliance for Excellent Education website.

Groundbreaking research at Auckland University has found that people with dyslexia appear to be trying to read with a different side of their brains than other people. The research breakthrough, which found that dyslexics try to read with the right side of their brains, may eventually help scientists to work out a way of helping them learn to read. Read more about this research in The New Zealand Herald.

A new study from Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) has found that focused, sustained professional development for teachers can have a positive impact on student achievement. Too often, however, teacher professional development programs do not reflect the characteristics most associated with improving student learning. Find the report at the McREL website.

The much-debated reading program Success for All was deemed by a U.S. federally financed randomized study to have achieved better results for students in real-world conditions than other programs.

A study of Reading Recovery conducted for the New Zealand Ministry of Education by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research has found the reading intervention program to be to be “very useful,” especially for students considered academically at risk. Find a summary and links to the report in Education Week (requires paid subscription).

The ability to handle complex reading is the major factor in readiness for college, according to a study by ACT.

 Find out more about the implications of this study for federal and state education funding and the training of high school teachers.

Why can we understand complex sentences, while our nearest cousins — apes — only understand individual words? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig believe they have found part of the answer. Read about their study of the human language processing faculty in Science Daily.

The link between illiteracy and delinquency in teenagers is well known, but it has not been clear which comes first and when the problem occurs. A new study confirms a connection between poor reading-readiness and behavior problems in preschool boys. Learn more about the study in BBC News (UK).

Genes have a greater influence on how young children learn to read than has been thought previously, according to the authors of a new research study. The study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Research in Reading, is the first to demonstrate the influence of genes on potential reading ability in children younger than six. More information is available at the ABC.net.au (Australia) website.

Research has questioned the impact of synthetic phonics teaching, which was backed by a government literacy review. This article appears on the BBC News website (UK).

For a different perspective on the same research, see an article in the Yorkshire Post.

A study done by Florida Atlantic University suggests that studying science can help reading skills and raise standardized test scores.

Government-funded research conducted by York and Sheffield universities has found that systematic phonics instruction resulted in improved reading accuracy among children of all abilities. The researchers have recommended that all reading education programs in England include explicit phonics instruction; however, they stopped short of endorsing any one method over the others. Get details in the Yorkshire Post (UK).

It has become an annual rite of summer. Out come the Sats/GCSE/A–level results — take your pick — and up pops a government minister to say that grades are higher than ever, teachers and schools have done a fantastic job, but there’s still room for improvement. Not everyone takes this at face value and there are a few grumbles about exams becoming easier. But even if there are suspicions that standards have dropped, no one has ever seriously suggested that children’s cognitive abilities have deteriorated. Until now.

Read about the startling finding of new research into how children develop maths and science skills. This article appears in The Guardian (UK).

Self-discipline is a better predictor of academic success than IQ, according to a recent article by Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E.P. Seligman in the journal Psychological Science. The study looked at one group of 140 eighth graders and another group of 164 eighth graders in a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse magnet school in a Northeast city.

An article by Jay Mathews in the January 17 edition of the Washington Post discusses the study, which found that "highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable, including report card grades, standardized achievement test scores, admission to a competitive high school, and attendance."

For further information, visit the Washington Post website.

At a time when more than one-third of K-12 students in the United States are non-white and about one in 10 speaks limited English, the need for culturally responsive teachers and classrooms is greater than ever before. An article by Susan Black in the Research section of the January 2006 issue of American School Board Journal examines some of the issues involved and presents suggestions for things teachers can do to make their classrooms more culturally responsive. Read the full article.

[Editor's note: As a service to those who have requested it, this article that appeared on pp. 8–9 of the print version of Reading Today, describing the wide variety of reading-related research projects funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, is offered here so that it is available for online access.]

The pressure associated with high-stakes testing has no real impact on student achievement, according to "High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act," a study released on September 20 by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University and the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

The authors, Sharon L. Nichols, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Gene V. Glass and David C. Berliner, Arizona State University, studied the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test data from 25 states. The results suggest that increases in testing pressure are related to increased retention in grade and drop-out rates. The authors found that states with the highest proportions of minority students implemented accountability systems that exerted the greatest pressure. Thus, they maintain, the negative impacts of high-stakes testing will disproportionately affect America's minority students.

What the researchers could not find is also interesting. Many different analyses were unable to establish any consistent link between the pressure to score high in a particular state and that state's student performance on the NAEP. That means that claims of a clear-cut link between pressure and performance cannot be considered credible.

For further information, visit the "News" area of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University website.

Good teachers form the foundation of good schools, and improving teachers’ skills and knowledge is one of the most important investments of time and money that local, state, and national leaders make in education. Yet with the wide variety of professional development options available, which methods have the most impact on student learning? Find a survey of recent research on the topic in Research Points, the quarterly research brief on education published by the American Educational Research Association.

Nine-year-olds scored higher in reading (and mathematics) on average in 2004 than in any previous assessment year, according to the newly released NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress, an analysis of long-term trends in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Other results showed that seventeen-year-olds scored about the same in reading in 2004 as they did in 1971, but achievement gaps among ethnic groups have been narrowing.

Efforts are under way to establish international education standards, a recent conference for education journalists in Paris has been told. Andreas Schleicher, coordinator of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), noted that such standards would enable researchers to make better use of data from international assessments in comparing academic performance across cultures and measuring change across time. Get details in The Age (Australia).

Claiming that most education research has no impact on schools and is ignored by policymakers, Melbourne University professor Peter Cuttance is calling for the establishment of a national network of researchers, policymakers, teachers, principals, and parents to decide what should be researched. Read more in The Age (Australia).

A keynote address today at the 4th Annual Conference of the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network in Toronto will highlight results of the recently released Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL). Yvan Clermont, international coordinator for the survey, is expected to point to changes in policy and practice that can make a difference for the next generation. Find out more about the survey in Canada Newswire.

Educational effectiveness depends primarily on teachers and the way they teach and handle their classes. This is the conclusion of a new study by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). Regardless of new learning materials or curricula the quality of educational content will always be highly dependent on the quality of instruction, the study points out. It summarizes a wealth of new research from countries with different social and economic backgrounds. Get access to the report through UNESCO’s Education for All website.

English learners can master social English — or basic interpersonal communication skills, often referred to as “playground English” — in a year or two. But researchers say it takes five to eight years to learn academic English, that is, to gain cognitive academic language proficiency. And this is the English students need to read textbooks, pass tests, and otherwise excel in school. In his report on language minorities for the National Center for Education Statistics, researcher Steven Klein examines the effectiveness of several approaches to English language instruction in helping students achieve these higher levels of proficiency. Read about Klein’s report in the American School Board Journal.

In an effort to improve the literacy levels of their students, both Britain and the United States have implemented education policies that call for “a highly structured classroom framework that spells out what should be taught, how it should be taught, and for how long.” But how well do such structured plans work? Do they improve reading abilities, and can they do so at a reasonable cost? British researchers Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally studied one such program to find out. Read about their study of “The Literacy Hour” in Education Next.

A study by German researchers has found no link between computer use in schools and a student’s learning of basic skills, such as math or reading. In fact, say Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University, “the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed.” Read more about this study in the The Telegraph (U.K.).

A useful summary of “the nine components of effective, research-supported reading instruction” can be found at the Reading Rockets website. This list, first published by the Learning First Alliance, includes the five components specified in the National Reading Panel report — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension — together with writing, spelling, assessment, and motivation.

Student progress monitoring is a practice that helps teachers use student performance data to continually evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching and make more informed instructional decisions. Authors Nancy Safer and Steve Fleischman describe the approach and examine its effectiveness in the February 2005 edition of Educational Leadership.

How does quality of instruction affect reading ability in high school English classes? How do students in different course tracks and from different socioeconomic backgrounds respond to high-quality instuction? Researchers William Carbonaro and Adam Gamoran report that although the quality of instruction tends to be inconsistent across tracks, “access to high-quality instruction and content may be particularly important in mitigating the effect of socioeconomic status on reading achievement.” A summary of their report is presented in the current edition of ASCD’s Research Brief.

Figuring out why a child has difficulty reading is not an exact science, but it’s getting closer to that. University of Western Ontario psychology professor Marc Joanisse is exploring ways to map the brains of readers to see what goes wrong—and what goes right. Find out more in The London Free Press.

“A Focus on Vocabulary,” published by the Regional Educational Laboratory at Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, examines what research reveals about how students acquire vocabulary and about what instruction must do to help students develop the kind of vocabulary knowledge that will contribute to their reading success. Authors Fran Lehr, Jean Osborn, and Elfrieda H. Hiebert focus on vocabulary instruction as a component of reading comprehension, rather than as a stand-alone program. Full report.

Two billion people — a third of the world’s population — will be learning English in the next decade, according to British researcher David Graddol. This growth will see French declining internationally, while German is set to expand, particularly in Asia. Get details in this BBC News story.

In this article in American Educator, author Joseph A. Torgesen presents evidence that early screening can identify children at risk of reading failure in their very first years of schooling. He goes on to discuss specific, active interventions that can then be applied in kindergarten through second grade to interrupt or prevent the “nasty downward spiral” of early reading failure.

Full essay

A recently released study called ''Lifetime Effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40 '' shows that a thoughtfully designed preschool program can improve the lives of children who go through it for decades afterward, according to this New York Times story. The Christian Science Monitor examines the same story.

High/Scope Educational Research Foundation

This study of the effects of a selected preschool program followed 123 African Americans born in poverty and at high risk of failing in school. Half of the participants received a preschool program based on High/Scope’s participatory learning approach, and half received no preschool program. The study found that adults at age 40 who had the preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not have preschool.

Overview and full report

The Age (Australia)

A four-year study has found that teachers talk too fast and bombard students with excess words, leaving them struggling in a “sea of blah” and possibly contributing to unnecessary referrals for behavior disorders. The study concluded that a back-to-basics teaching style of slower speech and steady eye contact improved literacy and reduced behavioral problems.

Full story

The Guardian (United Kingdom)

The development of a new “language” to describe the way we talk could help overseas students develop a more natural command of English, according to the team behind it. The new approach to looking at speech — “the grammar of talk” — was published by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority this week to help improve the teaching of “speaking and listening” English.

Full story

National Council for Agricultural Education

“Strategies for Teaching Reading in Secondary Agriscience: A Blueprint for Research and Practice” addresses the problems many secondary and middle school students face in understanding the reading required to succeed in the content areas. The research report discusses the variables that affect reading proficiency and suggests ways that content-area teachers can provide explicit instruction in comprehension strategies “from the primary through the high school years.”

Full report

Most educators agree that teachers should read aloud to their students on a regular basis. A study published by the International Reading Association in the September 2004 issue of its peer-reviewed journal, The Reading Teacher, takes the practice a step further by defining the seven components expert teachers use to ensure that read-alouds are interactive and effective.

BBC News (United Kingdom)

A new sign language created over the last 30 years by deaf children in Nicaragua has given experts a unique perspective on how languages evolve and the clearest insight yet into how humans learn language.