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Rural schools and other traditionally hard-to-staff schools continue to struggle with the recruitment and retention of qualified special education teachers. Beginning special educators are two and one half times more likely to leave their positions than their general education counterparts. The study reported here extends the literature base on teacher retention by exploring factors that contribute to the professional growth and job satisfaction of a particular group of beginning special educators in a variety of settings, including rural, urban, and suburban districts, both elementary and secondary school level settings, and resource or more self-contained settings. The study's findings hold implications for individuals responsible for teacher development and the administration of school funds and resources.

This study examined reading comprehension and word recognition effects of corrective feedback during oral reading on the performance of readers with learning disabilities. In a repeated measures design, students with learning disabilities read under three treatment conditions: corrective feedback on every oral reading error, correction on meaning change errors only, and no feedback regardless of errors. Corrective feedback on oral reading errors had a significant positive effect on both word recognition accuracy and reading comprehension. Results are discussed in relation to theory and practice.

Abstract. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of Corrective Feedback during oral reading on reading comprehension performance. A total of 34 students were classified by reading skill level into two groups: Primary (skill range 1.5-3.0) and Intermediate (skill range 3.5-5.5). Within each group half of the students were randomly assigned to either a Corrective Feedback condition or to a No Correction condition. Four dependent variables were obtained from the results of a miscue analysis, story retell, comprehension questions and oral reading errors. Few significant differences occurred between students' comprehension performance at either skill level under either condition. Overall comprehension performance was good under both conditions. The results of this study do not support the position that corrective feedback is detrimental to reading comprehension.On common strategy in reading instruction upon which there is relatively high consensus involves children with some kind of oral reading experience under teacher supervision (Howlett & Weintraub, 1979;Mason & Boggs, 1978). There is, however, little consensus on how much oral reading should be scheduled and perhaps more importantly, how the practice should be structured. In regard to the latter, serious disagreements exist on the need for and type of corrective feedback. As suggested by Hoffman (1979), it is the teacher's theoretical orientation which will most likely influence instructional practices related to corrective feedback. Two prominent models which present radically opposing positions on the need for corrective feedback are the psycholinguistic and direct instruction models.Requests for reprints should be addressed to Kathleen M. McCoy at the above address. The authors are grateful to Joseph Jenkins and Kenneth Ho well for their comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.