We compared year-long gains in fluency and comprehension in grades 3-5 in 3 treatment and 4 comparison schools. Treatment schools implemented a comprehensive school reform (CSR) program called Bookworms. The program employed challenging text and emphasized high text volume, aggressive vocabulary and knowledge building, and contextualized strategy…

Piecewise growth models (PGMs) were used to estimate and model changes in the preliteracy skill development of kindergartners in a moderately sized school district in the Pacific Northwest. PGMs were applied to interrupted time-series (ITS) data that arose within the context of a response-to-intervention (RtI) instructional framework. During the…

Let's Know! is a language-focused curriculum supplement developed through the Institute of Education Sciences' Reading for Understanding initiative aimed at supporting prekindergarten through grade 3 students' listening and reading comprehension. The current study reports results concerning the impacts of 2 instantiations of Let's Know! on…

Common Core Reading Standard 10 not only prescribes the difficulty of texts students should become able to read, but also the difficulty diet of texts schools should ask their students to read across the school year. The use of quantitative text-assessment tools in the implementation of this standard warrants an examination into the validity of…

This study describes an evaluation of a read aloud intervention to improve comprehension and vocabulary of first-grade students. Twelve teachers were randomly assigned to an intervention or comparison condition. The study lasted 19 weeks, and the intervention focused on the systematic use of narrative and expository texts and dialogic interactions…

In this study, a school district adopted Kindergarten Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (K-PALS), a scientifically based, class-wide peer-tutoring program for reading. Sixteen new K-PALS teachers were assigned randomly to receive ongoing support from a university expert or from experienced K-PALS teachers within the district. K-PALS teachers who…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the influence of a book distribution program targeted at enhancing children's exposure to information books. The research examined whether a flood of information books in early childhood settings, placing libraries in a central role, could affect growth in language, content-related…

We examined growth trajectories of writing and the relation of children's socioeconomic status and language and/or speech impairment to the growth trajectories. First-grade children (N = 304) were assessed on their written composition in the fall, winter, and spring, and their vocabulary and literacy skills in the fall. Children's SES had a…

This study examined the efficacy of a shared book-reading approach to integrating literacy and science instruction. The purpose was to determine whether teaching science vocabulary using information text could improve low-income preschoolers' word knowledge, conceptual development, and content knowledge in the life sciences. Teachers in 17…

Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. Dozens of measures funnel into five major factors that systematically vary as a function of types of texts (e.g., narrative vs. informational) and grade level: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word…

The present study involved examining whether a storybook reading intervention targeting mathematics vocabulary, such as "equal," "more," and "less," and associated number concepts would increase at-risk children's vocabulary knowledge and number competencies. Children with early numeracy difficulties (N = 124) were…