The Virginia public-school assessment and accountability system impacted the statewide reading proficiency scores for students with disabilities. The purpose of this causal-comparative quantitative study was applied to answer the research question, and hypothesis statement and determine the difference in the reading improvement measured by the…

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…

Direct Instruction (DI), commercially marketed by McGraw-Hill as Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading, is a bundle of highly scripted reading programs emphasizing phonics and phonemic awareness. This assessment considers 40 recently published studies on DI in order to consider the program's aims and efficacy as a means of teaching reading. Our…

Read It Again! PreK (RIA) is a whole-class, teacher-implemented intervention that embeds explicit language and literacy instruction within the context of shared book reading and has prior evidence of supporting the language and literacy skills of preschool children. We conducted a conceptual replication to test its efficacy when implemented in…

Virtual Reading Coach assesses student reading abilities with MindPlay's Universal Screener and automatically develops a unique, differentiated syllabus of instruction and mastery-based activities for every student, thus improving their reading fluency. This report includes its logic model, foundational literature review, and summaries of…

Phonological awareness (PA) is defined as a child's ability to hear and manipulate parts of spoken language (National Early Literacy Panel [NELP], 2009; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000). Ensuring that children develop PA increases the likelihood that they are successful with later reading instruction. Two…

This paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study examining the effectiveness of Amplify Reading, a digital supplemental literacy curriculum that students play independently at school or at home, in improving student literacy outcomes as measured by end of year Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Next for…

We present results of an evaluation of the first year of a multi-year comprehensive middle school reading program. Four public middle schools in rural Virginia with large populations of students with limited reading proficiency participated in a study to determine the reading program's impact. We evaluated 235 students with low reading achievement…

This article proposes a model for design of early-grade reading programmes that is based on research and the implementation of research findings. The model has three components: (1) schools should provide instruction in a language their students speak and understand; (2) teachers should employ instruction that is consistent with the current…

The purpose of this program evaluation was to evaluate the Direct Instruction programs, Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading, from SRA McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, which were being used as a school-wide reading intervention. These programs were implemented at a small elementary school in the Piedmont area of North Carolina beginning in the…

No Child Left Behind Act created a paradigm shift in the education field for all students including students with disabilities. The act impacted students with disabilities because the expectation of education changed in many areas. The expectation of highly qualified teachers teaching utilizing research based strategies and the requirement of…

Nearly one-quarter of U.S. eighth graders score below basic on national assessments of reading (NCES, 2013) and are poorly equipped for the reading demands of secondary school. Struggling adolescent readers cannot summarize a simple passage, use context to determine word meanings, and have difficulties making text-based inferences. In addition,…

An objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of employing the SRA Decoding Strategies text on word recognition for a ninth grade male with a learning disability. The student was enrolled in a high school special education resource room in a large urban school district in the Pacific North west in a direct instruction reading resource…

"READ 180®" is a reading program designed for struggling readers who are reading 2 or more years below grade level. It combines online and direct instruction, student assessment, and teacher professional development. "READ 180®" is delivered in 90-minute sessions that include whole-group instruction, three small-group…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a content analysis of the types and occurrences of explicit instructional moves recommended for teaching five essentials of effective reading instruction in grades 1, 3, and 5 core reading program teachers' editions in five widely marketed core reading programs. Guided practice was the most frequently…