Here is the Program for our first completely independent SSSR conference. It is significantly larger than previous meetings, with a total of 73 posters and 92 talks. The high level of international participation we had in Stockholm is continuing with the Boulder meeting.

When you arrive at the Denver airport, you will take an underground train to the main terminal, and an escalator up to the baggage claim area. The rental car counters and the counter for the Supershuttle to Boulder will be to your right as you get off the escalator. The Supershuttle leaves for Boulder at 10 minutes after the hour and takes about one hour. The fare to the Regal Harvest House hotel is $22. There is a very pleasant garden, pool, and spa area to help you recover from your flight. You can also stroll up the Boulder Creek path to the University campus, the mountains, and the downtown mall area. An excellent web site for links to information about Boulder and the surrounding area is: http://www.bouldercoloradousa.com

Registration will take place from 4:00 to 9:00 PM on Thursday in the Millennium room (cash bar 7-9 PM), following Ron Carver’s pre-conference seminar. All attendees must register for the conference and wear name tags. Pre-registered attendees can pick up their name tags at the registration desk. If you have signed up for the group dinner Friday evening (90 have so far), you should pay ($28) at the registration table. If you have not signed up as requested in a previous email and would like to attend the dinner, send an email right away to rolson@psych.colorado.edu with "Dinner" in the Subject line.

The conference will begin Friday morning at 8:00 with a symposium organized by Joanna Williams and Anne Sweet on "The RAND Reading Study Group: Charting the Course for a National Research Agenda in Skillful Reading." Since SSSR is an international organization, members outside the U.S. are encouraged to offer their perspectives and experiences in their own countries. The RAND report and commentaries are available on the web at: http://www.RAND.org/multi/achievementforall

All individual talks in the parallel sessions are scheduled for 15 minutes, with 5 minutes for questions. This will allow precise synchronization of presentations in the parallel sessions. The two presentation rooms (Canyon and Sugarloaf) are immediately adjacent, so it will be convenient to move between sessions during the 5-minute question periods. Synchronized clocks will be visible to the presenters in each room, and a bell will signal you with five minutes remaining (one ring), one minute (two rings) and finish! (three rings). This was an effective procedure at the Stockholm meeting. It requires that speakers and session chairs pay very close attention to timing. Overhead and computer projectors will be available in each room. Windows PC computers will be available for PowerPoint presentations.

Talk abstracts were sorted through a neural net into categories that fit the 5-talk and 6-talk session constraints. As a result, there is some category overflow into two "Special Topics" sessions, and some category sessions have been filled in with one or two relatively unrelated talks. Remember that it is quite acceptable and convenient for you to move between the parallel sessions during the 5-minute question period after each talk.

Posters will be presented on Saturday from 10:00 to 12:00 (Poster Session I), and in the evening from 5:30 to 7:30 PM (Poster Session II), in the Century and Millenium rooms. The posters are alphabetically organized in the program by the first author’s name, except for dual presentations and presenters with scheduling constraints in the second session. The boards are 4’ x 8’. Excellent guidelines for poster presentations can be found at: http://www.psychonomic.org/sugg.htm

We are currently compiling all the talk and poster abstracts into MS word and PDF documents, alphabetically organized by the first author’s last name. These documents will soon be sent out to all on the list serve, and will be downloadable from the SSSR web site: http://www.gse.utah.edu/edst/sssr/

Please bring a copy of the program to the conference.

For those who are remaining in Boulder through Sunday evening, we are working on an afternoon tour to Rocky Mountain National Park, where the highest continuous road in the U.S. will have just been opened through the snowdrifts. We are thinking of combining this tour with an evening dinner at the rustic Gold Hill Inn west of Boulder. Further details and an interest poll will be sent later to the list serve.

Finally, thanks to all the presenters for contributing to this excellent program! We look forward to seeing you in Boulder.