State laws that mandate in-grade retention for struggling readers are widespread in the U.S., covering 34% of public-school third graders in 2023-24. This study investigates the impacts of Michigan's third-grade reading law on subsequent test scores and school progress outcomes for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 third-grade cohorts. Using a regression…

Reading Recovery (RR) was introduced throughout New Zealand during the 1980s, for children struggling the most with learning to read after 1 year of formal schooling. In May 2024, the Minister of Education decided the programme would no longer be funded beyond 2024. This decision was based on evidence that the programme was not as effective as…

The Cellfield reading intervention is based on the multi-deficit theory of reading difficulties and addresses several foundation skills of reading simultaneously. Existing research has confirmed that the Cellfield intervention leads to improvement in reading skill directly following the intervention, but little data exist to determine the…

Although writing instruction can positively impact reading for students across grades and levels of literacy, the extent to which these findings generalize to young students with literacy difficulties is unclear due to the dynamic nature of reading-writing relations. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine the effects of writing…

This case report describes a decoding intervention that was developed for and implemented with a 15-year-old female with significant word-level reading challenges. The intervention integrated multiple evidence-based approaches to improve decoding, including instruction in (a) phonemes-graphemes (sounds-symbols) that the participant did not know at…

The current study investigated the hypothesis that implementing a mindfulness intervention could significantly alleviate anxiety caused by a deficit in reading comprehension, as well as improve trait mindfulness and efficacy. Students with reading difficulties enrolled in a corrective reading intervention program served as participants. All…

Students with reading disabilities generally know fewer words (breadth) with less in-depth knowledge of those words (depth) than typical students. The present study examined the effects of a "moderately rich vocabulary instruction" in which both breadth and depth of vocabulary are addressed. Nineteen U.S. 4th- and 5th-grade students with…

One argument for early intervention for reading difficulties is that it can sustainably improve children's reading competence trajectory (the 'inoculation model'), but there are virtually no studies on sustained effects at the end of compulsory schooling. This study reports on a 10-year follow-up of a widely used early literacy intervention,…

The present study evaluated the effectiveness of a non-randomized summer reading program offered by a school district meeting or exceeding all National Summer Learning Project recommendations. The district had 10 years of experience delivering the program to Grades 1-5 students with or at risk of reading disabilities. Voluntary participation had…

Headsprout is a commercially available, computer-based reading intervention that has been shown to be effective with children without disabilities and with children with ASD. Although recent studies that conducted a randomized clinical trial have demonstrated efficacy, they did not report specifically on feasibility. The current RCT evaluated the…

We examined the efficacy of two interventions aiming to strengthen argumentative text comprehension in Greek secondary students with specific reading disability or low reading achievement of unspecified cause. The first intervention (control group, n = 29) was based on principles of systematic explicit instruction, whereas in the second one…

Although many studies have shown the efficacy of using flashcard interventions to increase sight-word reading, very few have investigated ways to increase sight-phrase reading. In the current study, a concurrent multiple-baseline across students design was used to examine the effects of a tablet-based flashcard intervention on the acquisition of…

Background: Effective reading comprehension teaching is an aspiration of education systems across the world. Teaching incorporating reciprocal reading theory and evidence is an internationally popular approach for improving comprehension. Aims: This paper uses two large cluster randomized controlled trials of similar reciprocal reading…

Parental involvement plays a crucial role in enhancing both academic achievement and social wellbeing of children with special educational needs. Compared to rich evidence from emerging systematic reviews of parent-involved interventions for children with other disabilities, little is known about those interventions for children with specific…

It is widely recognized that individuals with dyslexia have difficulties with word reading "and" spelling, and individuals with reading comprehension difficulties have low vocabulary knowledge. However, little is known about the extent to which spelling and vocabulary are informative of reading difficulties. In the present study, we…