Disciplinary knowledge of K-3 teachers and their knowledge calibration in the domain of early literacy.

Recently, investigators have begun to pay increasing attention to the role of teachers' domain specific knowledge in the area of reading, and its implications for both classroom practice and student learning. The aims of the present study were to assess kindergarten to third-grade teachers' actual and perceived reading-related subject matter knowledge, and to investigate the extent to which teachers calibrate their reading related subject matter knowledge by examining relationships between actual and perceived knowledge. Results indicated that while teachers demonstrated limited knowledge of children's literature, phoneme awareness, and phonics, the majority of these same teachers evaluated their knowledge levels quite positively.

Orthographic learning during reading: examining the role of self-teaching.

Thirty-four second grade children read target homophonic pseudowords (e.g., slurst/slirst) in the context of real stories in a test of the self-teaching theory of early reading acquisition.