Recognizing the importance of vocabulary for comprehension, Wilhelm asks two key questions: "which words do I teach and how should I teach them?" Through years of trial and error, Wilhelm has adopted these principles to answer "which words": teach "important" words students will see and use again; words necessary to conceptual understanding; words…

Discourse markers (DMs) instruction is currently receiving an increasing amount of attention in the literature on second language learning. As noted by Al-Yaari, Al Hammadi, Alyami, and Almaflehi (2013), and Algouzi (2014), the use of DMs is insufficient to support the development of the language skills, especially reading, of Saudi English as a…

I advance a theoretically and empirically-grounded case for designing for and learning from failure, and instantiate it in a learning design called Productive Failure (PF). I describe the key mechanisms and the design principles of PF. The PF learning design comprises a generation and exploration phase followed by a consolidation and knowledge…

Literacy skills are fundamental for all learners. For students with significant disabilities, strong literacy skills provide a gateway to generative communication, genuine friendships, improved access to academic opportunities, access to information technology, and future employment opportunities. Unfortunately, many educators lack the knowledge…

The Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) was grappling with several issues including: (1) A respectable rate of growth in student achievement for both fourth- and eighth-grade math in the state of Alabama, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), but below the national average; and (2) A growing concern about…

The purpose of the current research study was to compare the use of interactive instruction to direct instruction on the acquisition of personal finance skills for high school students. Participants were 45 high school seniors who were divided into a Traditional and an Interactive Instruction group. The 9-week research study measured the impact…

Background/Context: Which ideas should be included in the K-12 curriculum, how they are learned, and how they should be taught have been debated for decades in multiple subjects. In this article, we offer mathematics as a case in point of how new standards-related policies may offer an opportunity for reassessment and clarification of such…

In 2013, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program identified Manitoba as the province having the lowest reading achievement scores of grade 8 students across Canada. These poor results serve as an indicator that changes to the way teachers support struggling readers in the classroom and beyond its walls are essential. Struggling readers require…

In this article Jacquelyn Cooper-Edwards describes how she employed special strategies to help her students in a sixth grade class identified as "6E," many of whom were English language learners. It was quietly understood that the students in the homerooms assigned higher letters such as "6A" were considered the high achievers.…

Children with language impairment (LI) show an overall immaturity in grammatical structure. This includes difficulties with basic sentence constituents, pronouns, verb form elaboration, negative and interrogative sentences, noun phrase elaboration, and complex sentences. This article describes explicit instruction and scaffolding strategies, based…

An objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of employing the SRA Decoding Strategies text on word recognition for a ninth grade male with a learning disability. The student was enrolled in a high school special education resource room in a large urban school district in the Pacific North west in a direct instruction reading resource…

Increased student achievement is the goal of all educators, and to that end, teachers must engage in professional development so that they are introduced to new strategies. Moreover, these professional development offerings must be sustained with a follow-up plan that allows teachers to practice strategies and reflect and collaborate with…

This paper investigates Language models with an emphasis on an appraisal of the Competence Based Language Teaching Model (CBLT) employed in the teaching and learning of English language in Cameroon. Research endeavours at various levels combined with cumulative deficiencies experienced over the years have propelled educational policy makers to…

This action research study evaluated the effects of literacy strategies on academic achievement, motivation, and engagement of eighth-grade social studies students. Incorporating literacy strategies included teaching students to construct meaning, think critically, and build content knowledge, while stimulating their interests, using multiple…

This report, prepared in collaboration with the AISD Office of Innovation and Development (OID), summarizes the accomplishments of SEL in AISD from 2011-2012 through 2015-2016. A separate executive summary also was published. [For the executive summary, see ED627076.]