There is growing recognition of the need to end the debate regarding reading instruction in favor of an approach that provides a solid foundation in phonics and other underlying language skills to become expert readers. We advance this agenda by providing evidence of specific effects of instruction focused primarily on the written code or on…

Children learn language through participating in language-rich activities such as book reading. This longitudinal qualitative study explored the perception of 11 teachers and 78 kindergartners regarding children's participation in book-reading in order to understand how it is experienced by those most involved in this activity. Each participant…

In 2016, the Alaska State Board of Education reviewed and accepted 13 recommendations bundled as Alaska's Education Challenge. In 2022, the Alaska Reads Act was signed into law. The Act addresses the number one priority of Alaska's Education Challenge, which is to support all students to read at grade level by the end of third grade. The…

In a highly multilingual country like India, challenges and opportunities arise in education and language policy. Although multilingualism is often associated with developmental advantages, Indian primary school children generally show low learning outcomes, specifically on literacy. Here we examine the influence of mother tongue education and…

Youth literature can be regarded as an important educational tool. However, controversial issues in youth literature become more prominent and the different opinions (internationally and individually) on such issues place the focus more on censorship. This article aims to provide an overview and analysis of the discourse on censorship in…

Background: Misconceptions are unjustified beliefs about a topic. Nonetheless, they are pervasive among educational practitioners. Although the internet can be a powerful tool to learn and debunk misconceptions, their use requires competencies like navigating through search engine results pages (SERPs), evaluating the reliability of content, and…

In this quasi-experimental study, 608 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students explored 5 historical investigations. In the experimental condition, teachers used a cognitive apprenticeship model to teach students historical reading and writing strategies. Comparison teachers used the same materials to deliver a business-as-usual form of…

The present study investigated the identification of end of first grade (n = 125) and end of third grade (n = 77) reading comprehension difficulties using beginning of first grade decoding-related and language-related predictors. Reading comprehension was defined using a composite of three standardized reading comprehension measures. Students at…

In the late 1980s Batia Laufer worked with teachers who believed that to understand a text it was enough to understand 80% of the text's word tokens. In response, Laufer set out to calculate the minimal text coverage, i.e., percentage of running words in a text the reader should understand to comprehend it reasonably well. In 1992, she explored…

The young generation, born into digital technologies and called Millennials or the Y-Generation, are raised in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets (Hamari et al., 2014), and they are constantly engaged in digital activities. However, research on the impact of digital devices on learners' educational performance and motivation…

The Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) model for instructional delivery is well supported by research evidence and is often identified as a critical element of instruction for students with learning difficulties. However, there are challenges associated with effectively releasing responsibility to students. This may be especially true during…

A common goal of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) is to provide learning environments that adapt to the varying abilities and characteristics of users. This type of adaptivity is possible only if the ITS has information that characterizes the learning behaviors of its users and can adjust its pedagogy accordingly. This study investigated an…

The Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) model for instructional delivery is well supported by research evidence and is often identified as a critical element of instruction for students with learning difficulties. However, there are challenges associated with effectively releasing responsibility to students. This may be especially true during…

Over a 12-week period, the researchers implemented explicit and systematic reading instruction using grade-level fiction to evaluate the effects on the oral reading fluency and comprehension of seventh and eighth grade urban students at risk of academic failure. Ten students in the experimental group were provided systematic instruction consisting…

Difficulties in implementing effective instruction for at-risk students arise from two challenges: the transfer of evidence-based knowledge and the lack of economic resources. Computer-assisted programmes offer a suitable solution, providing quality instruction using low-cost resources. Thirty-two first-grade students with early learning…