Purpose: The primary aims of this study were to: (1) to describe average change in the writing quality of fifth grade students from the fall and spring of the school year; (2) examine relations between linguistic features and writing quality rating; and (3) test for differential growth between groups of students who differ in linguistic and…

The purpose of this observation study was to identify vocabulary instruction provided to students with Learning Disabilities (LD) and English Learners with LD (dual identified) across seventh and eighth-grade inclusion and self-contained English language arts, science, and social studies classes. The study focused on the amount of time observed on…

Stealth assessment has been successfully embedded in educational games to measure students' learning in an unobtrusive and supportive way. This study explored the possibility of applying stealth assessment in a digital reading platform and sought to identify potential in-system indicators of students' digital learning outcomes. Utilizing the user…

We show how the novel use of a semantic representation based on Osgood's semantic differential scales can lead to effective features in predicting short- and long-term learning in students using a vocabulary learning system. Previous studies in students' intermediate knowledge states during vocabulary acquisition did not provide much information…

In an intelligent tutoring system (ITS), it can be useful to know when a student has disengaged from a task and might benefit from a particular intervention. However, predicting disengagement on a trial-by-trial basis is a challenging problem, particularly in complex cognitive domains. In the present work, data-driven methods were used to address…

The current study examined statistically significant differences between struggling and adequate readers using a multicomponent model of reading comprehension in 796 sixth through eighth graders, with a primary focus on word reading and vocabulary. Path analyses and Wald tests were used to investigate the direct and indirect relations of word…

Vocabulary.com is an online adaptive game that teaches students words by systematic exposure to a variety of question types and activities and by understanding all the word meanings and nuances as they are learned. Vocabulary.com teaches 14,000 words using over 208,000 questions. It has been implemented with the Houston Independent School…

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students' performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and…

The authors examined 1,781 rural students' reading motivation and behavior across the transition from middle to high school. Using expectancy-value theory, they investigated how motivational variables predicted changes in reading behavior and achievement across the transition in terms of their expectancies, values, and out-of-school reading…

Although instruction has been shown to be effective at increasing vocabulary knowledge and comprehension, factors most important for promoting the acquisition of novel vocabulary are less known. In addition, few vocabulary studies have utilized models that simultaneously take into account child-level, word-level, and instructional factors to…

The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to evaluate the effectiveness of morphological instruction on middle school students. This study compared the overall reading performance growth as measured by MAP scores of students who received morphological instruction and of students who had not. In addition, this study also compared MAP reading…

This study explored the relationship between two dimensions of vocabulary knowledge, that is, breadth of vocabulary (the number of words known) and depth of vocabulary (the richness of word knowledge), and their effects on different aspects of English reading in Chinese high school students learning English as a second language. Two hundred and…

This study explores reader, word, and learning activity characteristics related to vocabulary learning for 202 fifth and sixth graders (N = 118 and 84, respectively) learning 16 words. Three measures of word knowledge were used: multiple-choice definition knowledge, self-report of meaning knowledge, and production of morphologically related words.…

Despite a longstanding awareness of academic language as a pedagogically-relevant research area, the construct of academic language proficiency--understood as a more comprehensive set of skills than just academic vocabulary--has remained only vaguely specified. This study examines the potential--for both research and practice--of a more inclusive…

Word reading fluency and word reading accuracy play a critical role in reading development (Perfetti, 1985; Stanovich, 1986) and are related to multiple language components such as phonological, morphological, and vocabulary skills in monolingual children. Our knowledge about this relation remains limited in bilingual children, however. This study…