The ability to compose argumentative essays of sufficient quality is tantamount to the aptitude of thinking independently and critically, which is vital to playing an active part in one's society. Thus, the aim of teaching students this skill is incorporated into virtually every secondary school curriculum in almost all democratic countries around…

This experimental study examined the effectiveness of a text-based reading and vocabulary intervention with self-regulatory supports for 4th graders with low reading comprehension. Students with standard scores on the Gates MacGinitie Reading Test between 1.0 standard deviation (SD) and 0.5 SD below the normative sample were included (N=44) and…

Writing may be an especially useful tool for improving the reading comprehension of lower performing readers and students with disabilities. However, it is reasonable to expect that students with poor writing skills in particular, may actually be less adept at using writing to improve their reading skills, and may not be able to do so without…

Number sense is critical to the development of higher order mathematic abilities. However, some children have difficulty acquiring these fundamental skills and the knowledge base of effective interventions/remediation is relatively limited. Based on emerging neuro-scientific research which has identified the association between finger…

Adolescent English language learners (ELLs) with learning difficulties face many challenges when reading in the content areas. In this article, we review what research tells us about how best to support ELLs' reading comprehension and content learning. We draw from recent research syntheses as well as individual studies. We highlight one…

This study examined the effects on math performance of the use of the rekenrek, a manipulative developed by Adrian Treffers. The rekenrek looks like an abacus, but differs in that it is based on a five-structure and not a ten-structure system. It is comprised of two rows of 10 beads, each broken into two sets of 5 by color (i.e., in each row the…

This study compared the effects of two types of instruction on the learning of content-area vocabulary words of six middle school students with learning disabilities. A multiple-baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the two instructional models (i.e., definition and concept model) on the percent of…