The trouble with education research is that the research is burdened with trouble before it begins. Working as a poststructural education researcher and engaged in a recent research project that sought to engage with questions of teacher identity, I employed an alternative data elicitation method of literary response groups--similar to that of…

Decades of reading research have improved our understanding of the ways that young children learn how to read and of the component skills that support the ongoing development of reading and reading comprehension. However, while these investments have transformed reading instruction and reading outcomes for many learners, too many children are not…

Decades of reading research have improved our understanding of the ways that young children learn how to read and of the component skills that support the ongoing development of reading and reading comprehension. But while these investments have transformed reading instruction and reading outcomes for many learners, too many children are not…

The action research presented in this paper seeks the answer to the following research question: do targeted fluency interventions positively impact comprehension? This research included a test group of ten sixth grade Special Education students and a control group of ten sixth grade General Education students. Both the test and control groups…

"The New Digital Scholar" presents innovative thinking and groundbreaking research on the challenges NextGen students face with research-writing projects. Reminding readers of the history of the academic research paper and the scope of the recent information explosion, editors McClure and Purdy open a discussion long silent in academic…

Disciplinary literacy encompasses not only the ability to read the texts of a discipline, but also to engage in the practices and discourse of that discipline. At the center of the discipline of history is inquiry. For these students to move from their ninth grade expectations about history toward the authentic discipline of history, they would…

The aim of this work is to explore recent research in the field of leadership as related to education and to link such research to a possible research project. This research project would focus on increasing standardized test scores in California schools focusing on the elementary school level through focusing on increasing reading competency and…

An action research project was undertaken focused on integrating recorded readings and Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) into center-based instructional time in a third-grade classroom. Initial DIBELS test results were used to select 6 struggling readers, all of whom showed improved fluency in response to our instructional interventions. The…

In today's digital world the Internet is becoming an increasingly predominant resource for science information, rapidly eclipsing the traditional science textbook in content area classrooms (Lawless & Schrader, 2008). The shift challenges researchers, educators, administrators, and policy makers to reconsider what it means to read and…

This article includes discussion about a formative study in which inquiry was used as ESL instruction for second-grade emerging bilinguals. Drawing on the literature and research surrounding English learners, comprehension, informational text and inquiry, the teachers and researcher integrated comprehension strategy instruction with inquiry and…

This Teaching Tips article describes a classroom-based research project conducted between a teacher and a researcher. The topic arose from the teacher's concern about the inaccuracies and misconceptions exhibited by many of her third-grade students as they fluently decoded unfamiliar expository texts. The teacher researched her practice and the…

It is well-established that language skills are amongst the best predictors of educational success. Consistent with this, findings from a population-based longitudinal study of parents and children in the UK indicate that language development at the age of two years predicts children's performance on entering primary school. Moreover, children who…

The goal of this study was to compare the literacy skills of adult native English and native Spanish ABE speakers. Participants were 169 native English speakers and 124 native Spanish speakers recruited from five prior research projects. The results showed that the native Spanish speakers were less skilled on morphology and passage comprehension…

State tests, which assess reading comprehension, ask students to make inferences and connections beyond the text. The problem of practice in which this study is situated is that students are having difficulty making meaningful connections and developing inferences in relation to the material that is read aloud together in class or assigned for…

As part of its proposal to the U.S. Department of Education, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) committed to developing Kindergarten through Grade 2 Model Content Frameworks for English language arts (ELA)/literacy (K-2 Model Content Frameworks) to serve as a bridge between the Common Core State Standards…