Education Commons^™

How Should Context-Dependent Words Be Taught To Beginning Readers?, Abigail M. Turner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined three different instructional methods for teaching beginners to read context-dependent words. Two types of context-dependent words were taught: irregular past tense verbs and function words. The words were embedded either in scrambled contexts or in meaningful sentence contexts. Three different instructional conditions to teach the words were compared. In the Meaningful Context condition, students studied the target words embedded in meaningful sentences. In the Scrambled condition, students studied target words placed in scrambled word sequences. In the Combination condition, students studied target words in both types of contexts that were alternated across learning trials. Participants were 53 …

Do Spellings Of Words And Phonemic Awareness Training Facilitate Vocabulary Learning In Preschoolers?, Robin O'Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of phoneme awareness training and orthography to the learning of new vocabulary words by partial alphabetic phase readers. We hypothesized that four and five year old children taught to segment words with letters would outperform those trained with shape markers and those that received no segmentation training on an invented spelling task. We also hypothesized that students seeing the spellings of new vocabulary words (names) would learn the words in fewer trials, remember the names and features better and would be able to better recognize letter labels when presented alone. …

The Effects Of School Autonomy On Students' Reading Achievement In Early Grades: A Dose-Response Treatment Approach, Esther Ferreira Dos Santos Carvalhaes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

School autonomy is at the core of influential educational policies aimed at improving school effectiveness and students' academic performance both in the United States and abroad. Initiatives that promote a transfer of authority from higher levels of the school system to local schools, such as the charter school movement and School-Based Management (SBM), have become increasingly popular in the last two decades. These initiatives operate under the premise that local stakeholders (principals, teachers, and parents) understand their students' needs better than higher-level administrators, which enables them to make better educational decisions regarding students' academic success. However, despite the prominence of …

A Comparison Of Vocabulary Learning From Joint Reading Of Narrative And Informational Books With Dual Language Learner Children, Deborah Bergman Deitcher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Comparison of Vocabulary Learning From Joint Reading of

Narrative and Informational Books With Dual Language Learner Children

By: Deborah Bergman Deitcher

Advisor: Professor Helen L. Johnson

This study examined joint reading of narrative and informational texts in the home setting, between parents and their English-Hebrew dual language learning preschool children. Parent-child dyads were video-recorded while reading two sets of books; each set contained one narrative and one informational text on the same theme. Children's target word learning of 48 target words (12 words per book) of varying difficulty levels was measured from pretest to posttest. Results showed that children …