This study examined the impact of knowledge-building curricula on raising reading achievement for students from high-poverty backgrounds. The overall purpose of the study was to contribute to our understanding of curricula that may be effective in closing achievement gaps for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds compared to…

Educators and researchers have been fighting the reading wars for the last century, with battles see-sawing literacy instruction in American schools from phonics to whole language and, most recently, back to phonics again. Over the last decade, 32 states and the District of Columbia have adopted new "science of reading" laws that require…

The purpose of this evaluation was to examine the impact of i-Ready Personalized Instruction on reading achievement, as measured by SBA scores. We compared students in schools using i-Ready Personalized Instruction school-wide (Treatment students) to students who only received i-Ready Diagnostic assessments and who were in schools only partially…

This study examined the relationship between two reading curriculum based measures (oral reading fluency and MAZE) and the reading and mathematics subsections of a high stakes test administered at the 5th and 6th grades. Bivariate correlations were conducted between each curriculum based measure and each subsection of the test. Results indicated…

This in-brief technical report documents the results from two different analytic approaches for examining the reliability of the slope for easyCBM® reading measures in Grades K-8. Results varied by grade, assessment measure, and the analytic approach. Results patterns are discussed.

This study investigated teachers' efficacy and implementation in the context of a supplemental intervention for struggling adolescent readers. It examined teachers' efficacy at the start of their intervention training and investigated relationships among teachers' efficacy, implementation, and students' reading progress. The efficacy and…

The purpose of this study was to explore the efficacy of two Response to Intervention (RTI) Tier 2 literacy programs used with sixth graders in a middle school setting to determine if the use of either the SuccessMaker® or READ 180® Tier 2 RTI literacy program for two marking periods, or eighteen weeks, positively impacted student achievement as…

To meet the constantly changing needs of schools and diverse learners, educators must frequently monitor student learning, revise curricula, and improve instruction. Consequently, it is critical that careful analyses of student performance data are ongoing components of curriculum decision-making processes. The primary purpose of this study is to…

The use of oral reading fluency (ORF) as a predominant measurement tool for identifying struggling readers has grown exponentially over the past 30 years. ORF growth using curriculum-based measures (CBM) has also become an important practical and empirical issue influencing the field. Although fluency scores have shown to be reliable predictors of…

Alternate assessments have been used for the last 10 years to evaluate schools' efforts to teach children with significant cognitive disabilities. However, few studies have examined the reading skills of children who participate in these assessments. The purpose of this study was to extend understanding of the reading skills of this population by…

Pursuing student voice in your design of curriculum helps students take more ownership of their learning. Gaynor and Shanklin developed an open-ended survey to gather information about students' growing understandings of the purposes for reading and writing and to solicit feedback about the year's activities. The survey is presented here, along…

Summer setback, which is defined as a decline in academic achievement over the summer months, occurs in many academic areas but seems especially problematic in reading. We assessed students from a midwestern parochial school serving predominantly students from a low--socioeconomic status background for their reading achievement before they left…

This study estimates the effect of one year of Fusion Reading implementation, a multistrategy intervention, builds on the work of the Strategic Instruction Model's Learning Strategies Curriculum and Xtreme Reading by integrating some of the same strategies (e.g., paraphrasing, visual imagery, and self-questioning for information acquisition;…

Data published on the official website of the NYC DOE indicated that slightly less than half (42%) of NYC students in grades three through eight are not proficient in ELA, and one quarter of them (25%) are not proficient in Math. School reform based on Hirsch's Cultural Literacy provided an additional dimension to exploring school reform and…

This study addressed three basic questions involving the amount of measurement needed to obtain valid estimates of reading growth. Participants were 41 students with learning disabilities from Grades 3 to 8, monitored across 10 weeks using curriculum-based measurement (CBM) of words read correctly (WRC). We compared growth slopes based on…