In this article, we review the skills that have been found to be related to good story comprehension in novice readers with normal hearing and describe the relative weight each plays. The relationship between effective story comprehension and lower level skills (such as syntactic awareness and vocabulary knowledge) is considered, and the casual…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a program evaluation of a school district's Reading Recovery program. This quantitative study involved analysis of extant student reading achievement data from the first grade Phonological Awareness and Literacy Screener (PALS) and third grade Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments.. Participants…

Research shows that Black and Latino students continue to perform significantly below their white counterparts in academic achievement. How school leaders support teachers who work with the Black and Latino students comprising this gap was the premise of this study. This study was conducted to understand the role of school leaders in supporting…

Several challenges arise when researchers or practitioners attempt to assess the literacy skills of toddlers, including a lack of developmentally appropriate measures, toddlers' more limited communication ability, and how literacy is defined in the years before age three. This paper describes four new measures of early literacy development and…

This teaching tip outlines a comprehension strategy designed to support early primary students in reading to learn while learning to read. The strategy is born of the authors' classroom practices and is designed to support young children in reading and understanding informational texts by facilitating close interactions between text and reader.…

Over the past 50 years, substantial changes have occurred in the texts used for beginning reading instruction. This article analyzes four perspectives that have most influenced these texts in the United States over this period and the changes in these texts in relation to those in the nation's demographics and young children's literacy-related…

The current study was designed to understand the development of comprehension monitoring among beginner readers from first to third grade, and to determine the extent to which first graders' comprehension monitoring predicts reading comprehension in grade three. Participants were 113 children (57% female) from four US states who were followed from…

The current climate of reading instruction calls for fluency strategies that stress automaticity, accuracy, and prosody, within the scope of prescribed reading programs that compromise teacher autonomy, with texts that are often irrelevant to the students' experiences. Consequently, accuracy and speed are developed, but deep comprehension is…

I conducted 2 experiments in which I tested the effects of a reader immersion procedure on the technical reading comprehension responses to print stimuli for 4 kindergarten students and 3 first grade students. The participants selected for this study textually responded to words at a rate of 80 words correct per minute with 0 incorrect words per…

The dissertation explored the efficacy of using a POMDP to select and apply appropriate instruction. POMDPs are a tool for planning: selecting a sequence of actions that will lead to an optimal outcome. RTI is an approach to instruction, where teachers craft individual plans for students based on the results of screening test. The goal is to…

This is a data report on the Innovation for Learning (IFL) tablet instruction. The report presents the performance of students who were exposed to the IFL tablet instruction. The IFL tablet instruction involved the teaching of early reading in kindergarten and first grade in 29 elementary schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD)…

Young children who are learning to negotiate print experience emerging literacy. For adults who are beginning entrance into the navigation and negotiation of print literacy, the term "burgeoning" is selected as a more accurate portrayal of the nature of literacy extension into adulthood. This phenomenological case study investigates the…

School efforts to engage parents are posited to influence whether and how they are involved in their children's schooling. The authors examined educators' engagement efforts in beginning reading, their subjective evaluations of engagement practices, and beliefs about parent involvement, in two stratified samples of New Zealand elementary school…

Manipulative objects have long been an essential tool in the development of mathematics knowledge and skills. A growing body of evidence suggests using manipulative letters for decoding practice is an also an effective method for teaching reading, particularly in improving the phonological and decoding skills of students at risk for reading…

The purposes of this study were to examine the diversity of the authors and illustrators in core reading series and to evaluate the opportunities and limitations of these texts in relation to the goals of multicultural education. The authors began their research concerned about whose stories are told in core reading series, and who gets to tell…