Reading was one of the areas targeted by most states for assessment because it not only is a critical area in academics, but also an area where most students were not showing gains. The National Education Association (NEA, 2004) prescribed reading as the catalyst for both learning and achievement. Reading difficulties typically being in the…

Students with disabilities, like their economically disadvantaged counterparts, experience lower expectations and less demand for academic success from teachers. Students who experience both disabilities and social and economic disabilities may experience even less rigorous expectations from their teachers who experience only one condition or the…

Wide vocabulary knowledge is associated with proficiency in reading comprehension and scores on tests involving comprehension. Yet assessments show that U.S. students at various grade levels have demonstrated no improvement in their vocabulary knowledge since 2009. Literacy expert Timothy Rasinski and colleagues argue that students need improved…

Understanding how to support student reading comprehension has long been a goal for education research. Yet no existing literature review links interactional scaffolding, defined as the responsive in-person support an expert reader offers to a novice, and reading comprehension. This review employed theories of scaffolding and reading comprehension…

Single-case designs provide an established technology for evaluating the effects of academic interventions. Researchers interested in studying the long-term effects of reading interventions often use curriculum-based measures of reading (CBM-R) as they possess many of the desirable characteristics for use in a time-series design. The reliability…

We conducted a meta-analysis of 16 existing studies to examine the nature of the comprehension problems for children who were second-language learners with poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding. Results indicated that these children had deficits in oral language (d = -0.80), but these deficits were not as severe as their reading…

Reading comprehension, or understanding the author's message, is a critical component of teaching literacy (Hougen and Smartt 2012). Student-centered activities using the iPad with the goal of improving reading comprehension in a fifth-grade classroom were implemented for this action research study. University teacher candidates guided fifth-grade…

This teaching tip showcases how students use iPads to video record themselves orally reading. In the Record, Listen, Reflect process, students conduct repeated readings with a familiar text, watch the recorded video, and conduct running records on themselves. Having an opportunity to watch videos of their own reading gives students a glimpse of…

Over the past 65 years, the roles of the reading specialist have continually evolved. Historically, reading specialists have been hired by schools to work predominantly with struggling readers (Bean, Cassidy, Grumet, Shelton & Wallis, 2002; Bean, Swan & Knaub, 2003). Reading specialists today serve in a variety of roles within their…

As the incidence rate of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) appears to increase, the need for evidence-based reading interventions for these students, which are important for the reading development of students with ASD, also increases. Unfortunately, there has been little research on evidence-based strategies to effectively improve the…

Guided and grounded by Eisner's 1982 "Model of Transactions Between the Individual and the Environment," this paper explores how students negotiate perceptions of meaning that are both internalized through the art of reading a text and experienced through individualized transactions of representational and conceptual comprehension.…

An emerging body of research has evaluated the role of growth mindset in educational achievement, yet little work has focused on the unique role of mindset to standardized reading outcomes. Our study presents four key outcomes in a sample of 195 fourth-grade students. First, we evaluated the dimensionality of general and reading-specific mindset…

The script relativity hypothesis proposes that the scripts we read and write affect our cognition. The current study tested this hypothesis by comparing Chinese and English cognitive-linguistic skills and three cognitive abilities, including verbal working memory capacity, nonverbal IQ, and arithmetic calculation, across groups of children with…

Kentucky's Targeted Interventions (TI) program is a statewide intervention intended to prepare non-college-ready high school students for college-level coursework. Using a difference-in-regression discontinuity design, we find that TI reduces the likelihood that students enroll in remedial courses by 8 to 10 percentage points in math. These…

Purpose: In this study, the authors draw upon 10 years of collaborative teaching and research as two, White, women literacy teacher educators to theorize the role of humanizing pedagogies within literacy teacher education and share explicit examples of how these pedagogies might be operationalized in actual classroom settings.…