The acquisition of reading skills in a person's native language is a key life component to functioning successfully within their society. Unfortunately, many German students have significant reading difficulties in their native language, German. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to translate into German and implement a promising U.S. reading…

Purpose: The effectiveness of the 14-component evidence-based whole-school reform Success for All (SfA) has been well established, but research on its implementation is limited although fidelity of implementation is vital for the effectiveness of such a program. This review sheds light on this issue. Design/Approach/Methods: A systematic…

Recent initiatives in the United States and United Kingdom have added greatly to the amount and quality of research on the effectiveness of secondary reading programs, especially programs for struggling readers. In this review of the experimental research on secondary reading programs, the authors focused on 69 studies that used random assignment…

The recently reported i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery (May et al., 2015) found an effect size of +0.69 in favor of Reading Recovery compared to the control group. We discuss four issues: (a) many of the lowest achieving students were excluded from participation in Reading Recovery; (b) the control group received a range of different experiences;…

This essay raises concerns over the future direction for educational aid designed to promote literacy in developing countries. The essay focuses on the EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment) initiative in Africa. At one level, this essay challenges the claims for empirical and research-based support for the EGRA. At a broader level, this essay…

The research compiled ten-year, foundational information about students enrolled in a developmental reading course. The institutional data collected included student enrollment, demographics, and academic markers of success. A pre/post survey examined students' reading attitudes to determine if reading attitudes changed through the course…

The purpose of this study was to identify the impact intensive reading instruction had for 28 students with learning disabilities at the middle school level on standardized tests. National Assessment of Education Progress testing indicates that across the United States, learning disabled students literacy skills are decreasing annually, and these…

Reading fluency is a critical component of effective reading instruction for students of early elementary age. However, national data suggest that 40% of U.S. fourth-grade students are nonfluent readers. Implementing evidence-based, time-efficient, and procedurally standardized instructional strategies may help address this problem. This study…

All public schools in the United States have been caught up in educational reform. This has especially been true since the 1980's. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was a major component in how schools have changed the process of educating students. In response to reform efforts, many schools have relied on their own knowledge to achieve higher…

Scripted curriculum materials are becoming more and more commonplace throughout schools in the United States. Scripted curriculum materials are instructional materials that have been commercially prepared and require the teacher to read from script while delivering the lesson. They reflect a focus on explicit, direct, systematic skills instruction…

In developed countries like the United States and Britain, the continuing challenge for educators is to sort through the choices of an all-you-can-eat school system and teach the basic skills. Despite so-called universal education, an alarming number of people still fail to reach even basic levels of literacy. The "literacy hour" was…

Components of the School Renaissance[R] program, including Accelerated Reader and Reading Renaissance, have been implemented in more than 65,000 schools in the United States. Despite the program's popularity, there have been no published, well-controlled evaluations of its effectiveness. This randomized field experiment was designed to gauge…