Education Readings All Three Articles Are Scholarly

Education Readings

All three articles are scholarly because they were written by professional educators, mostly professors at the university level, who carried out statistical studies of the reading abilities of students. One of these studies used a control group, another compared males and females, and the third compared highly-motivated and less-motivated learners. In "Solving the Problem of Summer Reading Loss" (2011), James S. Kim and Thomas G. White studied four groups of 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students to determine the efficacy of summer reading programs. Kim was a professor at the Harvard School of Education and White a research scientist at the University of Virginia, and the focus of their research in was the well-known discrepancy in reading levels between low-income and middle-income students and between whites and minorities. Pok-Chua Siah, a professor of psychology and counseling and Wai-Ling Kwok, a postgraduate student, conducted a study of the effectiveness of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) with 362 Chinese students in Hong King, which were divided into two groups of High Value and Low Value readers. In the study "Increasing Reading Comprehension through the Explicit Teaching of Reading" (2009), L. Prado, and elementary school teacher and L.A. Plourde, a university professor of education, compared the reading abilities of 4th grade students in order to determine the differences between how girls and boys learned to read.

These three academic articles all had sections referring to previous research in the fields and used statistical analysis to derive their results, while pointing out areas that needed further research. Prado and Plourde noted that past research had demonstrated that there were gender differences in brain activity and body chemistry which gave girls the advantage in learning how to read, so much so that by high school boys were twenty points behind on average. Girls had more signs or brain activity while reading and the test group of 57 students showed that they achieved significantly higher test scores on the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) from October to January in the 2009-09 school year. Both the boys and the girls took the same reading course that emphasized phonetics, making inferences, using background knowledge to make connections, repeated oral reading, and comprehension and vocabulary instruction. Since the girls improved more significantly than the boys from the pre- to the posttest, this strongly indicates that a one-size-fits-all type on instruction that takes no account of gender differences will be less than optimally effective (Prado and Plourde 2009). Siah and Kwak noted that in the U.S. only 51% of students were prepared for college-level reading in 2006 and reading scores had declined nationally from 1992 to 2005. Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) practice for 15-20 minutes every day was often touted as a way to increase student interest in reading, but the results to date have been disappointing. Their study of 362 Chinese students in Hong Kong found that SSR was more effective in the group of High Value Readers and with those who had more parental contact and involvement in their reading activities (Siah and Kwak 2010). Kim and White studied 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students at two schools with predominately low-income, minority populations in order to test different methods of improving reading skills over the summer. They noted previous studies that demonstrated the growing gap in reading levels between low-income and middle-income students, particularly in the 1st to the 5th grades, with over half of the decline coming about during the summer months. They divided their study into four groups: a control group that received no books over the summer; a group that was simply given eight books to read; a third group given eight books plus fluency lessons before the end of the school year; and the fourth group given fluency and comprehension lessons prior to summer vacation -- with the latter making the greatest gains in reading levels (Kim and White 2011).