From the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE)

National Evaluation of Reading Comprehension Programs

Launched. Many children struggle with comprehending the more complex texts and other reading materials that are used in the upper elementary grades for subjects such as social studies and science. This is especially true of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. NCEE is conducting an evaluation of the effectiveness of reading comprehension programs with direct instruction of comprehension skills for expository or informational text.

• Five reading comprehension programs have been selected for piloting in the 2005-06 school year, including ReadAbout (Scholastic), Skills Handbook (SRA), Reading for Knowledge (Success for All), Project CRISS, and Read for Real (Zaner-Bloser).
• Elementary schools will be randomly assigned to use the various reading programs or to a control group during the 2006-07 school year.
• Contractors for this 4-year evaluation are Mathematica Policy Research, RG Research Group, and RMC Research.

ERIC Begins Content Updates

ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center, now adds journal articles and full-text documents to the database on a weekly basis. In early August, ERIC added over 1,000 free, full-text documents, including Department of Education reports, materials from State Education Agencies, professional association papers, and other grey literature resources. More than 5,000 journal articles (published in 2004-2005) were also indexed in ERIC. Recent enhancements include a browsable list of journals indexed in ERIC (see ERIC News).