Success for All (SfA) is a comprehensive school reform program designed to support schools serving many students of disadvantaged backgrounds to increase students' achievement. SfA includes daily 90-min reading lessons with extensive use of cooperative learning, tutoring for struggling readers, and an emphasis on parental involvement. School teams…

This exploratory investigation examined the transformation of a traditional summer reading intervention (SRI) to synchronous virtual format in response to school closures due to COVID-19. Goals were to adapt and describe the adaptation of the in-person intervention to the virtual environment, examine program outcomes, and understand tutor and…

Video self-modeling (VSM) has been used for decades to effectively improve individuals' behaviors and skills. The purpose of this review is to locate and analyze published studies that used VSM for typical school-based academic skills to determine the effect of VSM interventions on students' academic performance. Only eight studies were located…

U.S. social programs, set up to address important problems, often fall short by funding specific models/strategies ("interventions") that are not effective. When evaluated in scientifically-rigorous studies, social interventions in K-12 education, job training, crime prevention, and other areas are frequently found ineffective or…

Contemporary education is experiencing substantial reform across legislative, pedagogical, and assessment dimensions. The increase in school-based accountability systems has brought forth a culture where states, school districts, teachers, and individual students are required to demonstrate their efficacy towards improvement of the educational…

The Collaborative Language and Literacy Instruction Project (CLLIP) is a model of professional development designed to help teachers incorporate research-based practices of literacy instruction, support mastery, and sustained use of these practices through coaching, and serve as a foundation for whole-school reform efforts. We describe the model,…

As teachers, administrators, and members of intervention teams use student performance data to inform instructional decisions and monitor implementation of tiered instruction in a Response to Intervention (RTI) model, assuring fidelity of implementation or treatment integrity continues to be a challenge. This article describes how one school…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of Whole Faculty Study Groups on student achievement and teacher practices in grades K-3 of a Nebraska school district. Whole-Faculty Study Groups (WFSG) are a type of professional learning community (PLC). Using a mixed method approach, both K-3 student scores on Dynamic Indicators of Basic…

While structural reform has certainly inspired change in Boston's public schools, its true value is best measured by examining the impact those changes have had on students. Seen through the lens of student performance over the past five years there is ample suggestion that these structural changes have been more than just window dressing--they…

Reading First has been implemented in Nebraska since the 2004-5 academic year. In two rounds of funding and participation, schools have transformed the way they trained their teachers, measured student progress, and taught. This transformation is one of the hardest tasks in education and it has taken the considerable dedication of school personnel…

Preparing special educators who are knowledgeable about evidence-based interventions for teaching reading to students with reading difficulties and who are capable of using curriculum-based assessments to monitor student progress and differentiate interventions is vital to the success of current school reform efforts. The primary purpose of this…

This action research report describes a program to increase students' reading comprehension and fluency through the use of guided reading. The targeted population consists of second and fourth grade students in a northwest suburban area of a large city located in the Midwest. The problems of low reading comprehension and fluency scores were…