Project Activities
The researchers proposed to carry out five studies of the sources of individual and developmental differences in reading comprehension with students in the second and fourth grades.
The first two studies are designed to test different models of the possible sources of individual and developmental differences in students' reading comprehension. The researchers are collecting student performance data on reading tests over a 3-year period of time and using statistical analyses to investigate the relationships among such characteristics as students' vocabulary, working memory of what they're just read or heard, awareness of how words are formed, and ability to 'decode' (i.e., to recognize and read words by translating the letters into speech sounds to determine the word's pronunciation and meaning). In the third and fourth studies, the researchers are carrying out two experiments in which the instruction of different groups of students focuses on the improvement of one or more of these student characteristics of decoding and vocabulary, in order to study how training in one characteristic leads to changes in the other characteristics and in overall reading comprehension. In the fifth study, the researchers are examining different kinds of measures of reading comprehension by comparing traditional published reading comprehension tests with tests that more closely resemble the material that students normally read in class, and with a new test that focuses on students' comprehension of specific passages of reading material, to explore the tests' potential for identifying the sources and solutions to problems in student progress in reading comprehension.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications:
Books
Wagner, R.K., Muse, A., and Tannenbaum, K. (Eds.). (2006). Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for Reading Comprehension. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Book chapters
Priya, K., and Wagner, R.K. (2009). The Roles of Fluent Decoding and Vocabulary in the Development of Reading Comprehension. In R.K. Wagner, C. Schatschneider, and C. Phythian-Sence (Eds.), Beyond Decoding: The Behavioral and Biological Foundations of Reading Comprehension (pp. 124-139). New York: Guilford Press.
Wagner, R.K., and Muse, A. (2006). Short-Term Memory Deficits In Developmental Dyslexia. In T. Alloway, S. E. Gathercole (Eds.), Working Memory and Neurodevelopmental Disorders (pp. 41-57). New York, NY US: Psychology Press.
Wagner, R.K., Muse, A., and Tannenbaum, K. (2006). Promising Avenues for Better Understanding Implications of Vocabulary Development for Reading Comprehension. In R.K. Wagner, A. Muse, and K. Tannenbaum (Eds.), Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for Reading Comprehension(pp. 276-292). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Wagner, R.K., Phythian-Sence, C., and Tannenbaum, K. (2006). Vocabulary Acquisition: A Primer. In R.K. Wagner, A. Muse, and K. Tannenbaum (Eds.), Vocabulary Acquisition: Implications for Reading Comprehension (pp. 1-14). New York: Guilford Press.
Journal articles
McBride-Chang, C., Cho, J.R., Lie, H., Wagner, R.K., Shu, H., Zhou, A., Cheuk, C., and Muse, A. (2005). Changing Models Across Cultures: Associations of Phonological Awareness and Morphological Structure Awareness With Vocabulary and Word Recognition in Second Graders From Beijing, Hong Kong, Korea, and the United States. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 92(2): 140-160.
McBride-Chang, C., Wagner, R.K., Muse, A., Chow, B.W.Y., and Shu, H. (2005). Morphological Awareness in Children's Vocabulary Acquisition in English. Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics, 26(3): 415-435.
Tannenbaum, K.R., Torgesen, J.K., and Wagner, R.K. (2006). Relationships Between Word Knowledge and Reading Comprehension in Third-Grade Children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 10(4): 381-398
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