2005) Pages: xvii + 420 ISBN: 0-8058-4656-5 Cost: $40 Reviewed by Fariba Haghighi Islamic Azad University Children's Reading: Comprehension and Assessment emerged from the presentations in a conference held to promote lively exchanges of ideas on reading comprehension and assessment in the early stages of development. Some distinctive features of this volume include linking past, present, and future of reading comprehension research; balancing theory, practice, and policy; linking assessment

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... instruction; and other influential factors of preschoolers' reading comprehension. Each section is comprised of four chapters, beginning with an original study, continuing with discussions and recommendations, and ending with several potential research areas. The last chapter of each section offers commentary by an expert which links the previous three chapters together, reviews key points, criticizes the controversial issues, and concludes with practical suggestions. The first section provides "Historical and Theoretical Foundations" of assessing reading comprehension. Accordingly, Chapter One by Sweet represents a range of methodological perspectives in the field of reading, pointing out the inadequacies of the existing comprehension assessment. In Chapter Two, Pearson and Hamm provide extensive information regarding the present status of assessing reading comprehension through historical accounts, and they raise relevant questions for further research. Kintsch and Kintsch, in Chapter Three, put forward a model of reading comprehension, and identify the factors that make reading comprehension difficult; they write: "Comprehension is not a single unitary process. It requires the delicate interaction of several component processes" (p. 71). They also specify three levels of the comprehension process in reading through examples and figures. Being in agreement with Sweet, Kintsch and Kintsch also claim that current comprehension tests, despite their user-friendly nature, do not measure the whole understanding of the comprehension process. The last chapter of this section, "Comprehension as a Nonunitary Construct," emphasizes the importance of the theory in developing comprehension assessments. In this chapter, Duke reviews the previous studies and concludes that the comprehension process involves a number of sub-skills that vary by type, topic of the text, and the purpose of the reader. The second section examines the "Developmental and Motivational Factors in Reading Comprehension." In Chapter Five, Broek et al. illustrate the improvement of reading comprehension and basic literacy skills in pre-school and early elementary school children, believing that the two skills develop side by side. The researchers describe ways to develop a