Initiating Assessment of Student Needs in Content Areas

As students move through the elementary grades they encounter more and more reading in the content areas: social studies, science, mathematics, and English. Most teachers are aware of the burden that vocabulary and concept load place upon each student\u27s ability to understand what he/she has read. Although teachers usually group students according to reading ability to facilitate basal reading instruction, there is often little or no effort expended to meet individual or group reading needs in the content areas. One reason for this neglect may be that teachers lack systematic ways of assessing students\u27 mastery of the technical vocabulary in the content areas

Reading Assessment--The Third Dimension

Assessing a student\u27s progress in reading should be an integral part of every reading program. Most teachers use standardized or informal tests for the diagnosis and evaluation of reading achievement; however, a third means of assessment is available to teachers. This article is intended to help educators legitimatize this often ignored method of assessing reading behavior and evaluating reading performance

Rx for Round Robin Oral Reading

For more years than I care to count, round-robin oral reading has been a part of classroom instruction. When Dolores Durkin (1978) sought to study instruction in comprehension, one of her findings was that round-robin oral reading was common during the reading and social studies lessons. Oral reading was often poor under these circumstances-children stumbled over hard-to-pronounce terms, read in a monotone, and were often difficult to hear (1978,p.32). Round robin oral reading, for the uninitiated, is a procedure that has students in a reading group taking turns reading orally. This reading may follow silent reading or may be done at sight. Although basal readers are usually used as the reading material, I\u27ve also seen round-robin reading take place with weekly news magazines and content area books. This situation is deplorable and there is no support in the literature for such a practice

A List of Basic Sight Words For Older Disabled Readers

The Dolch basic sight vocabulary of 220 words has generally been recognized by reading authorities as a valuable asset to reading instruction. Research by Dolch (1941), Fry (1960), and Zintz (1966) and Johns (in press) has shown that the 220 words comprising the Dolch list represent 50 to 75 per cent of all school reading matter in the elementary grades. According to Dolch, these 220 words are recognized instantly by good second-grade readers and by average third-grade readers

Updating the Dolch Basic Sight Vocabulary

Word lists for reading instruction have long been of interest to educators. It has been noted by Johnson and Barrett (16) that over 125 word lists have been constructed during the past seventy years. Of these many word lists, there is little doubt that the Dolch list has received widest publication and use. Authors of texbooks on the teaching of reading (1, 8, 18, 23) have made reference to the Dolch list with suggestions for teaching the words. In addition, many reading materials have been developed to help teach these words in isolation and in context. Books have been written with the Dolch words and a small number of nouns to give children practice in using these words in a natural reading situation. Johnson (15) is probably correct in observing that hundreds of thousands of children have been asked to learn these 220 basic words