The purpose of this phenomenological bound case study was to explore the effect of acquiring sight words on reading fluency and comprehension skills for early literacy learners during a summer reading camp at one elementary campus in south Texas. Study findings indicated that through prescribed learning experiences with sight words that included…

Theory and empirical work suggest that teachers' social capital influences school improvement efforts. Social ties are prerequisite for social capital, yet little causal evidence exists on how malleable factors, such as instructional management approaches, affect teachers' ties. In this cluster-randomized trial, we apply a decision-making…

Summer reading loss is a prevalent problem that occurs primarily for students who are not exposed to or encouraged to read at home or in summer programs when school is out. This problem prevails among early readers from low-income backgrounds. This study provided 31 six and seven-year-old children with a structured guided reading program through…

Summer drift, otherwise known as loss of reading comprehension skills or reading achievement, has been a well-known and well-documented phenomenon of public education for decades. Studies from the late twentieth century to the present have demonstrated a slowdown in summer drift attributed to specific summer reading programs addressing motivation…

Many educator preparation programs desire to partner with P-12 and community groups. The authors showcase the development of a P-12 School-University-Family partnership. Partnership goals included literacy growth and interest among linguistically and culturally diverse P-12 learners while also providing a sustainable training ground for current…

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale qualitative study that explored the perceptions of and approaches used by UK school librarians and teachers in the design and use of reading lists. The research question was: "What is the best way to construct reading lists to maximize their benefit in the school library or classroom?" The…

The Reading Apprenticeship is an intervention that has been shown in previous studies to increase struggling readers, tested reading achievement by 8 to 9 months during a 12 week, in-school program. This article reports on the first study of the Reading Apprenticeship method conducted in the summer using parents, rather than supervised volunteers,…

Current national and international research indicates the summer break can negatively affect students' reading achievement. To counter this effect, our primary school with a range of students worked in collaboration with our local public library to plan and implement a summer reading programme. The purpose of the programme was to increase…

This study employs a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) design to develop an adaptive intervention with personalized print and digital content for kindergarten to Grade 2 children (n = 273). In Stage 1, we ask whether it is better for children to receive an adaptive intervention based on (a) 10 conceptually coherent texts or…

This appendix provides additional details on the underlying data, statistical models, and results presented in the main report. We first describe how we created each control and outcome variable and its source (e.g., parent report), followed by an overview of the logistic regression models employed, and then provide the full set of results from…

Summer learning experiences for school-age children can be provided in a variety of ways and settings, including summer school programs (often remedial), community-based programs (often a continuation of afterschool programs), and home-based programs (in which families are provided with information and resources to encourage reading, often run by…

The existence of an achievement gap in the academic performance among various subgroups of students is a well-documented phenomenon in American public education (Blackford & Khojasteh, 2013; "Education Week," 2004; Hayes & Grether, 1969; Hernandez, 2011; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2015). This is certainly the…

This mixed method study, grounded in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, examines if nonfiction e-books read independently by children enrolled in a summer reading program will increase vocabulary, improve comprehension, and enhance motivation to read as compared to children reading nonfiction trade books with adult support. Findings indicate…

Recognizing that standardized instructional treatments may not be equally effective across contexts, a growing number of scholars are arguing that the strategy of adopting packaged programs and striving to implement them faithfully is neither realistic nor desirable. An alternative view is that scaling up educational treatments requires balancing…

Kathleen Riley begins this article by providing quotes from James H. Lytle, and Anissa Weinraub, which were published in "Perspectives on Urban Education" in the summer of 2013. While they hold different professional positions (Lytle is a retired administrator and professor; Weinraub is a teacher and organizer), both wrote as…