Professional+Research+Collection

=// **Annotated Article Biographies:** //=


 * Cummings, K. D. (2011). Pathways to word reading and decoding: The roles of automaticity and accuracy. School Psychology Review, 40(2), 284-295. **

 In this study the researches wanted to look at the link Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) on accuracy for the ORF testing. The researchers first looked at the stages of alphabetic principle that the students that were participating in the study were in. This was done so the researchers knew how well the students new and understood letter sound relationships because of its impact on accuracy. They found that there was a strong correlation between the ORF and the NWF scores for each of the students. They reason that the research included NWF is because it took away the link to high frequency site words. Then the researchers could focus more on the letter sound principles that the students were strong with and the ones that they need to work on. Within the study, it was found that the students that were better at the NWF also tended to be better with ORFs because they had more strategies to figure out the words that they had struggled with. Lastly, students that were taught using the whole word approach did exhibit lower partial alphabetic phase which meant that they are limited in their phonemic awareness skills, have partial decoding skills, and incorrect blending skills. This resulted in the students not being able to read the nonsense words as whole words where as the other students were able to; however, it was not mentioned how those particular students did on the ORFs compared to the other students.


 * Donald, D. R. (1979). Effects of illustrations on early oral reading accuracy, strategies and comprehension. Educational Psychology, (49), 282-289. Retrieved from EBSCOhost. **

Although once thought to have no correalation between accuracy and book illustrations, researcher D.R. Donald has shown proof that students score higher on accuracy when books include illustrations. To find results, a sample was picked of 20 average students. Average was defined as being the in the middle of the 50% of reading achievement. Students read 2 books, with a random selection of which book went first, the illustrated or non-illustrated. Illustrations were shown to help with overall comprehension, syntactic acceptability and semantic acceptability. Accuracy rates increased from an average of 82.73% when reading non-illustrated texts to an average of 86.67% with an illustrated text. This is important and validates the principles behind The Sister’s CAFÉ menu option cross checking. Using the illustrations is a skill that students can refer to by using cross checking to help students read more accurately. I feel that a strength of this research is that is defines what “average” is and also makes sure that students are picked randomly. I feel that the results will be more accurate. I also that that it was appriorate that when rating accuracy while listening to readers, self corrections and repetitions were not counted as errors. This reminds me of miscue analysis, which I feel is an accurate and professional way to assess students reading.


 * Hosp, M. K. (2004). Exploring the relationship between text-leveling systems and reading accuracy and fluency in second-grade students who are average and poor decoders. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 19(3), 176-184. **

 This particular article focuses on text leveling systems and how those systems rank text difficulty based on readability, decodability, the average number of words per sentence, and the percentages of high frequency words and multisyllabic words. From there, the study looked at how these levels of reading actually applied to students that were considered average achieving and low achieving readers in comparison with the students’ accuracy and fluency of the text. The study found that there wasn’t necessarily a link between the text leveling systems and the fluency and accuracy of the students.


 * Hudson, R. F., Isakson, C., & Richman, T. (2011). An examination of small-group decoding intervention for struggling readers: comparing accuracy and automaticity criteria. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 26(1), 15-27. **
 * Retrieved from EBSCOhost. **

This article notes the importance that decoding accuracy in an important skill but not always a trait of a proficient reader. Researchers suggest that automaticity is most important because it automatic and life long skill. An example of the difference between the accuracy and automaticity occurs while listening to a student decode “uncomfortable.” Does the student sound out every word or has learned to chunk sounds. Students in the sample of participants were asked to say letter sounds after hearing the model from the tutor as well as word family practice. Results were that students overall improved when the tutor was modeling. It would be interesting to see if this experiement could be replicated with the same results of improvements.

I thought that a strength of this journal article was that researchers were clear that fluency does not equal accuracy, which is something that I think can be an assumption that teachers make, but it is true that just because a student can read accuracy does not mean that are fluent, and it especially does not mean that students are comprehending and mastering skills.


 * Leal, D. J. (2005). The word writing cafe: assessing student writing for complexity, accuracy, and fluency. International Reading Association, 59(4), 340-350. Retrieved from EBSCOhost. **

This article makes reference to CAFÉ, which is way of introducing reading and writing strategies into the classroom. Although the article focuses on word writing, it also touches on how important accuracy can be to motivate students to write. The Word Writing CAFÉ is an assessment tool that allows teachers and administers to see how fluent as student writes, how accurate words are written and how complex of words students choose to write with. To score word accuracy, teachers would cross out misspelled words and duplicate words, along with other steps of scoring, teachers can see how well their students word write. The research in the article is broken into gender and has shown that in general, females uses more complex words, are more fluent and more accurate. Based on the results, teachers are see what are strengths and weaknesses of the class and evaluate their own teaching.

I liked this article because for the most part, accuracy refers to reading, but from this article you can see that it is just as important in writing as well. I am not familiar with type of assessment but I thought that this was an informative article that discussed may ways that this can help students. It also makes me wonder how many of these students that were assessed also were familiar with The Sister’s CAFÉ, I can make that assumption that they correalate, but I did not see that information in the article. The results are very beneficial to teachers, especially those who need to need help targeting what the class is struggling with.


 * Kolic-Vehovec, S. (2002). Effects of self-monitoring training on reading accuracy and fluency of poor reader. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 17(2), 129-138. **

 This article focuses on the benefits of self monitoring on students when they are reading. It discusses the benefits with both accuracy and fluency. In the study that was conducted, they have three control groups and then the test group where they are teaching the readers how to self monitor their reading, metacognition. They found that by teaching all readers how to monitor their reading, it increased their accuracy and fluency because they were actually thinking about what was read and the words that would make sense in the text that they were reading. They also discovered that as the students’ reading accuracy and fluency increased, so did their interest and confidence in reading.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Pany, D., & McCoy, K. M. (1988). Effects of Corrective Feedback on Word Accuracy and Reading Comprehension of Readers with Learning Disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 21(9), 546-50. Retrieved from EBSCOhost. **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Readers classified as learning disabled are usually more comfortable and are found reading orally, were the teacher is able to correct them after hearing miscues. This study found that students actually had better comprehension when their accuracy were corrected by the teacher, given feedback. This article does recognize that feedback does limit self-monitoring and ability to use strategies to read accurate. That being said, students scored higher on comprehension when feedback was given on errors of meaning versus no feedback. The theory behind this is that students pay too much attention to accurate decoding, which limits their attention to comprehend. For readers with learning challenges, that immediate feedback helped move past just focusing on accuracy and fluency to look at the big picture of meaning. Research also found that this feedback also helped with enhancing word accuracy.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">I thought that this article was an interesting perspective to have when working with students who struggle with reading and are classified. On the other hand, I feel that students are limited by always being correcting. I also feel that feedback can hurt self esteem, especially if reading is frustrating.