Public policies targeting individuals based on need often impose disproportionate burden on communities that lack the resources to implement these policies effectively. In an elementary school setting, I examine whether community-level interventions focusing on similar needs and providing resources to build capacity in these communities could…

Repeated reading is an intervention with strong evidence for improving students' oral reading fluency. However, little research has examined the use of this intervention outside of traditional school contexts. School closures due to COVID-19 forced schools and teacher preparation programs to create new approaches to evidence-based reading…

Background: Dialogic reading (DR) is an effective shared reading technique based on the prompts-evaluate-expand-repeat (PEER) sequence, which fosters children's language development. This study examines the effects of its elements by comparing shared reading with prompts with minimal feedback (PMF) and PEER. Methods: This study included 364…

Public policies targeting individuals based on need often impose disproportionate burden on communities that lack the resources to implement these policies effectively. In an elementary school setting, I examine whether community-level interventions focusing on similar needs and providing resources to build capacity in these communities could…

The purpose of this study was to present, compare, and contrast data collected from rural Georgia educators concerning their beliefs and knowledge of the benefits of student retention. The researcher identified the most common areas of agreement and disagreement among educators concerning grade-level retention. Additionally, the researcher…

For many years, the conventional wisdom in the field was that grade retention was a bad idea. A 1997 opinion piece in "Education Week" titled "Grade retention doesn't work" reflected the prevailing sentiment in the education community and the available research evidence at that time: retained students performed worse than their…

The prevalence rate of learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has risen concurrently with their inclusion into public schools in Saudi Arabia. Being in schools, they face academic challenges, particularly in reading. This increased rate evokes the importance of implementing valuable strategies to keep up the academic skills of those…

As of 2021, eighteen states plus the District of Columbia have implemented legislation regarding mandatory test-based grade retention focusing on minimum reading proficiency levels (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2019) with many of those policies targeting the third-grade year. While grade retention has been largely viewed negatively…

With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) known as No Child Left Behind, Every Student Succeeds Act, and other school reforms, rigorous demands are placed upon administrators and educators when students do not make Adequate Yearly Progress. In trying to follow state goals to enhance students' academic…

This sequential mixed methods study evaluated the impact of the Chicago Parent Program (CPP) in 12 Baltimore Title I PreK programs on parent engagement and student outcomes from kindergarten through 2nd grade. Phase 1 (quasi-experiment; N = 11,996) compared PreK students whose parents enrolled in CPP with those whose parents did not enroll in CPP…

Will students who have not mastered kindergarten skills benefit from another year of kindergarten before going into grade one? It has been suggested that there is no other topic in education that has such a wide difference of opinion as those researchers who do not advocate retention and those who are convinced that a child should be given another…

Student retention in kindergarten is a common practice, so that students will obtain the necessary school preparation for elementary school. However, this practice is also used for students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), without sufficient research data on the impacts of retention on this group of students. The current study examines the…

We assessed nonword repetition (NWR) skills in 7-9 year-old children with dyslexia (dyslexia-only), developmental language disorder (DLD-only), co-occurring DLD+dyslexia, and typical development (TD) with a norm-referenced and an experimental task. The experimental task manipulated phonemic variability (dissimilarity among consonant phonemes…

Mandatory grade retention for poor-performing readers has been a disputed practice for decades. Since the early-2000s, state-level mandatory grade retention policies have proliferated. In 18 states and Washington, D.C. mandatory grade retention exists for students in the third-grade who fail an end-of-year standardized reading exam. These policies…

Nationwide, the percentage of four-year-olds enrolled in state-supported preschool programs has more than doubled since the early 2000s as states dramatically increased their investments in early childhood education. Florida's Voluntary Pre-kindergarten Program (VPK), which began in 2005, has been a national leader with respect to preschool…