Education Commons^™

Grades Five And Six Students’ Representation Of Meaning In Collaborative Wiki Writing, Shelley Stagg Peterson, Christine Portier

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

This paper examined grades 5 and 6 students’ participation in wikis while writing reports on social studies topics. An analysis of eight wikis showed that students represented meanings they had constructed about their topics by engaging in knowledge telling practices (e.g., introducing, stating, or repeating information or an idea and developing previous ideas with examples, statistics or other information) more frequently than they engaged in knowledge transforming processes, such as drawing conclusions, identifying cause-effect relationships, or making inferences or judgements. Our research shows that Bereiter and Scardamalia’s model (1987) is useful to inform the development of tools for assessing students’ …

Great Books For Late Summer Reading, Terrell A. Young, Barbara A. Ward

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

For decades now, reading experts have expressed concern that the competence gained by struggling readers during the academic year is lost during the summer months. While academic enrichment and remediation programs can reduce that loss, one of the best practices to build better readers is by having them read during breaks from school. At least one study clearly supports this suggestion. In his study of 1,600 elementary students in the mid-Atlantic area, researcher James Kim (2009) found that regardless of previous achievement level or race or socioeconomic level, children who read more books performed better on reading comprehension tests in …