This document provides an executive summary of "Reading First Impact Study. Final Report. NCEE 2009-4038." The final report presents findings from the third and final year of the Reading First Impact Study (RFIS), a congressionally mandated evaluation of the federal government's initiative to help all children read at or above grade…

The purpose of this article is to describe a strategy called the Poetry Academy used to boost reading skills in elementary school students. The Poetry Academy paired struggling readers with a community volunteer to read poetry on a weekly schedule to practice fluency, work on word recognition abilities, and build confidence. A research study took…

This study involved an examination of the impact of a self-questioning strategy on the text-reader assisted comprehension skills of six students in grades five through eight with reading disabilities (RD). The purpose of this study was to determine the degree older children with RD comprehend text-reader assisted text that is at or above their…

Employing prosody skillfully, one of the cornerstones of fluent reading, is an indicator of text comprehension. Morphological knowledge has been shown to underlie lexical acquisition and to be related to reading development. The relationship between reading comprehension, prosodic reading and morphological knowledge was investigated in 51…

The current study replicated Gickling and Armstrong (1978) by using curriculum-based assessment for instructional design to match reading materials to skill levels of three third-graders who were struggling readers with low levels of on-task behavior. Difficulty levels of the reading passages were grouped according to ratios of known and unknown…

This study evaluated the effects of a fluency-based reading program with 15 second and third grade students and 15 matched controls. Gains in oral reading fluency on untrained CBM probes were evaluated using a matched-pairs group-comparison design, whereas immediate and two-day retention gains in oral reading fluency on trained passages were…

"Earobics"[R] is interactive software that provides students in pre-K through third grade with individual, systematic instruction in early literacy skills as students interact with animated characters. "Earobics[R] Foundations" is a version for pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, and first graders. "Earobics[R]…

In this series of studies, we investigated the technical adequacy of three curriculum-based measures used as benchmarks and for monitoring progress in three critical reading- related skills: fluency, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. In particular, we examined the following easyCBM measurement across grades 3-7 at fall, winter, and spring…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 created the Reading First program to help ensure that all students could read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The program promotes practices recommended by the National Reading Panel for early reading instruction, highlighting essential components of reading instruction. As required by the…

This study examined the validity of Nonsense Word Fluency as an index of beginning reading proficiency for students in kindergarten through second grade. Validity evidence for Nonsense Word Fluency is addressed in the context of research-based instructional practices implemented on a large scale. Technical adequacy data are presented for all…

Over many decades, the efforts of researchers to understand key issues in the reading performance of those children most at risk for developing later reading problems has been relentless. This article presents the author's commentary to three studies: (1) Vanderwood, Linklater, and Healy (2008); (2) Edl, Jones, and Estell (2008); and (3) Baker et…

Although techniques of measuring reading rate have been studied and reported in the literature, actual practice is not always consistent with the findings. A study reexamined the reading rate issue in light of additional information regarding the test-taking experience provided directly by the test takers themselves. The purpose of the study was…

The purpose of this report is to examine aspects of oral reading performance--accuracy, rate, and fluency--that cannot be observed from results of the main NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reading assessment. The results provided here are intended to inform educators and researchers about these three aspects of fourth-graders'…

Examines the common and distinct contributions of context-free and context reading skill to reading comprehension and the contributions of context-free reading skill and reading comprehension to context fluency. Results support the conclusion that word level processes contribute relatively more to fluency at lower levels while comprehension…

Compares the influence of text difficulty on the growth of poor readers' reading ability over 18 weeks of 1-to-1 tutoring. Significant differences favored tutored children. Between approaches, the only significant difference was oral reading fluency, which favored students who read material at their reading level. Students who began with lower…