The goal of the current study was to compare two forms of dynamic assessment and standard assessment of preschool children's phonological awareness. The first form of dynamic assessment was a form of scaffolding in which item formats were modified in response to an error so as to make the task easier or more explicit. The second form of dynamic…

Reading fluency is commonly defined as reading accurately at a quick rate with appropriate prosody--a simple sounding definition. In fact, this definition hides complex processes and skills needed to produce the seemingly effortless performance of a fluent reader. Using both theory and empirical research, the presence and role of underlying…

Cognitive abilities that predicted growth in response to a 12-week training program in phonological awareness were investigated in 100 kindergarten children. Findings suggested that growth in analytic awareness was predicted by invented spelling and general verbal ability, while growth in synthetic awareness was predicted by a combination of…

A longitudinal (from kindergarten through grade 2) study with 244 children evaluated 3 hypotheses regarding the causal relationship between phonological processing abilities and reading acquisition. The study found a bidirectional relationship between phonological processing skills and reading skills and stability in individual phonological…

This article reviews research on effective classroom reading instruction that finds dramatic reduction in reading failure occurs when explicit instruction is provided in phonemic awareness and decoding skills, word recognition and text processing, construction of meaning, vocabulary, spelling, and writing. The need for small-group instruction for…

Summarizes recent studies identifying specific linguistic-cognitive markers for reading disabilities and describes efforts to develop measures of these markers in the areas of phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, and verbal short-term memory. (Author/DB)

This article proposes a two-factor theory of mathematics disabilities based on the premise that weak cognitive representations lead to poorer retrieval of information from long term memory. Comparison of children with math disabilities alone (MD) and those with both math and reading disabilities (MD/RD) suggests that weak phonological processing…