The Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) game-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) was developed with a foundation of comprehension theory and principles of learning science to improve students' comprehension of complex scientific texts. iSTART has been shown to improve reading comprehension for learners from…

Interventions for individuals with or at risk for reading disability (RD) need not occur only during the typical school day. Educators and researchers have been actively seeking opportunities to extend literacy learning through home-based, summer, and other tutoring programs. Nevertheless, alternative settings can pose greater difficulty with…

Students learn or progress at their own paces. How can schools make sure that they get the help they need--and only the help they need? Many are turning to multi-tiered systems of support. This brief provides some practical considerations for schools contemplating tiered approaches.

By 2030, most jobs will require some training beyond high school (a four-year degree, a two-year associate degree, or some type of industry credential). The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board established the 60x30TX Plan to focus collective attention on meeting this need. Progress has been made in the last decade, but COVID-19 has…

Two of the most important educational benchmarks are readiness for kindergarten and reading at grade-level by third grade. Focusing on emergent literacy skills during the PreK years boosts reading abilities and helps young learners reach these critical goals. Research validates what works in teaching children to read: Well-trained tutors and…

Students learn or progress at their own paces. Each needs different amounts of support, at different points in a school career and at different times of the school year. Some need very little help to stay on track, while others are facing serious challenges in learning, in their behavior, or at home, and need significant interventions. It would…

This policy brief summarizes the positive results of a rigorous evaluation of Reading Partners, a widely used program that offers one-on-one tutoring provided by community volunteers to struggling readers in low-income elementary schools. A total of 1,265 students in 19 schools in three states were randomly assigned to receive Reading…

Reading Recovery, a popular one-to-one tutoring program that Bush administration officials sought to shut out of a high-profile federal reading program, has gotten a rare thumbs-up from the federal What Works Clearinghouse. The positive rating comes after prominent researchers and federal reading officials tried to dissuade states and districts…

This article features the Project of Excellence, a program that was designed to engage families in an interactive community-based school literacy program. The authors discuss how they created the Project of Excellence. Although the goal of the Project was to improve the reading skills of young children, the focus of the Project was directed toward…

This program, included in "Effective Reading Programs...," is used by one of the affiliate groups of the National Affiliation for Literacy Advance (NALA), serving approximately 200 adults in Louisiana. The program used Laubach material, which combines a phonetic approach with symbol-sound association to teach functional illiterates how…

As a direct result of the passage of the America Reads Challenge Act in 1997, Mt. Mercy College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has developed a reading tutor program. The program includes a college credit course and on-site visits by college faculty supervising student tutors. This article includes the rationale for development of a credit course for reading…

With increasing attention focused on comprehension, there is a need for research regarding how to implement comprehension instruction for struggling readers and assess its effectiveness. This article describes reading instruction as it occurred over two years with one struggling reader in third and fourth grade. A comprehension checklist provided…

This program, included in "Effective Reading Programs...," was begun in 1971 and serves about 300 students in kindergarten through grade 6. Three or four children from each class, who are identified by test results and/or evaluation by a teacher or a reading consultant as those most in need of remedial reading instruction, are selected…

This program, included in "Effective Reading Programs...," serves 1728 students in kindergarten through grade six and 429 students in grades seven through twelve. Most of the students are white, live in a small town, and are from middle-income families. The program began in 1961 and provides detailed guidelines for each grade level on…

Programed Tutorial Reading is a highly structured tutoring project for first graders. It supplements regular classroom reading instruction and is conducted by either paraprofessionals or high school tutors, not by teachers. The project uses tutoring kits designed to match six of the most commonly used basal reading series. The kits specify in…