Vocabulary knowledge is a crucial component for success in and out of school. For most children, word acquisition hits a plateau in the middle of elementary school, which has a negative impact on their academic achievement. This study evaluated whether the instructional strategy of drawing cartoons improved the vocabulary achievement among 5th…

Imagination has been described as a cognitive endeavor that serves as a catalyst for creative actions and aids in the development of comprehension skills. Studies show that incorporating imagination into classroom practice builds on children's lived experiences and encourages the creative reworking of elements that enable the generation of new…

The action research presented in this paper seeks the answer to the following research question: do targeted fluency interventions positively impact comprehension? This research included a test group of ten sixth grade Special Education students and a control group of ten sixth grade General Education students. Both the test and control groups…

The purpose of this case study was to determine to what extent e-readers affected struggling readers as a part of reading instruction at the middle school level to improve students' literacy skills of comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary, and to show how e-readers affected engagement and self-efficacy of struggling readers to read and use…

One of the greatest challenges of an elementary school teacher is equipping students with comprehension strategies that transfer to all content areas. With stable levels of reading achievement over the last two decades in the United States, it is necessary that further research be conducted on methods of increasing students' comprehension…

This research project examined whether the use of Instructor-guided Supplemental Instruction as a classroom scaffolding technique, might help improve testing and assessment reading outcomes for reading-deficient college students. The study was completed at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee over the 16-week Fall, 2012 semester…

Although inquiry-based learning has been debated throughout the greater educational community and demonstrated with some effect in modern classrooms, little quantitative analysis has been performed to empirically validate sustained benefits. This quantitative study focused on whether inquiry-based pedagogy actually brought about sustained and…

This study was conducted utilizing a quasi-experimental pre- and postgroup design to examine the effects of a phonologically based intervention aimed to improve phonological awareness (PA) and reading abilities in school-age children with language impairment (LI) in Grades 1 through 3. The intervention included instruction in PA and sound-symbol…

The listening comprehension skill is frequently cited by both teachers and learners of a second language (L2) as perhaps the most difficult to deal with in any systematic way. One possible approach is to use the dictogloss task. This involves learners reconstructing a short text they have listened to. Originally developed to draw learners'…

The purpose of this project was to examine group- and individual-level responses by struggling adolescents readers (6th-8th grades; N = 155) to three different modalities of the same reading program, Reading Achievement Multi-Component Program. The three modalities differ in the combination of reading components (phonological decoding, spelling,…

Integrated reading/writing tasks are becoming more common in large-scale language tests. Much of the research on these tasks has focused on writing through reading; assessing reading through writing is a less explored area. In this article we describe a reading-into-writing task that is intended to measure both reading comprehension and language…

This study modeled the interrelationships of reading instruction, motivation, engagement, and achievement in two contexts, employing data from 1,159 seventh graders. In the traditional reading/language arts (R/LA) context, all students participated in traditional R/LA instruction. In the intervention R/LA context, 854 students from the full sample…

The current study uses a crossed random-effects item response model to simultaneously examine both reader and word characteristics and interactions between them that predict the reading of 39 morphologically complex words for 221 middle school students. Results suggest that a reader's ability to read a root word (e.g., "isolate") predicts that…

In recent years, children from a kindergarten in central Israel have been exposed to learning experiences in technology as part of the implementation of a curriculum based on technological thinking, including topics related to behaving-adaptive-artifacts (e.g., robots). This study aims to unveil children's stance towards behaving artifacts:…

Improving youth science comprehension in the United States is imperative to reverse current trends in student achievement and to meet an expected shortage of scientists in the future. This lag in achievement scores and need for future scientists is a problem. One challenge is to link inquiry-based learning and experiential education with…