The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between reading comprehension scores and conceptual mathematics scores of third grade students at a selected elementary school. The sample consisted of 27 students of which 15 were females and 12 were males. Data were collected using a teacher made conceptual math exam and the scores from…

Descriptive analyses: Approximately one-third of the nearly 7,500 utterances spoken by teachers were comments. Differences in the use of instructional strategies and content emerged in relation to curriculum condition. In contrast to the variability between teachers, little within-teacher variability was observed. On average, teachers used only…

Research over the last several decades has revealed that adolescents in the United States are leaving school with insufficient literacy skills to compete in the global marketplace. A primary contributor to poor literacy rates is poor reading comprehension. The purpose of this research was to develop and test the efficacy of a protocol for teaching…

Schools in the United States have been using the Accelerated Reader (AR) program since the mid-1980s. A search of the literature related to the effectiveness of the AR program revealed that many of the studies were conducted more than a decade ago, and a large number of those studies failed to utilize a control group to provide comparative data.…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

Vocabulary knowledge is a crucial component for success in and out of school. For most children, word acquisition hits a plateau in the middle of elementary school, which has a negative impact on their academic achievement. This study evaluated whether the instructional strategy of drawing cartoons improved the vocabulary achievement among 5th…

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 purpose of this case study was to determine to what extent e-readers affected struggling readers as a part of reading instruction at the middle school level to improve students' literacy skills of comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary, and to show how e-readers affected engagement and self-efficacy of struggling readers to read and use…

This research project examined whether the use of Instructor-guided Supplemental Instruction as a classroom scaffolding technique, might help improve testing and assessment reading outcomes for reading-deficient college students. The study was completed at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee over the 16-week Fall, 2012 semester…

This study was conducted utilizing a quasi-experimental pre- and postgroup design to examine the effects of a phonologically based intervention aimed to improve phonological awareness (PA) and reading abilities in school-age children with language impairment (LI) in Grades 1 through 3. The intervention included instruction in PA and sound-symbol…

The purpose of this project was to examine group- and individual-level responses by struggling adolescents readers (6th-8th grades; N = 155) to three different modalities of the same reading program, Reading Achievement Multi-Component Program. The three modalities differ in the combination of reading components (phonological decoding, spelling,…

Integrated reading/writing tasks are becoming more common in large-scale language tests. Much of the research on these tasks has focused on writing through reading; assessing reading through writing is a less explored area. In this article we describe a reading-into-writing task that is intended to measure both reading comprehension and language…

This study modeled the interrelationships of reading instruction, motivation, engagement, and achievement in two contexts, employing data from 1,159 seventh graders. In the traditional reading/language arts (R/LA) context, all students participated in traditional R/LA instruction. In the intervention R/LA context, 854 students from the full sample…

The current study uses a crossed random-effects item response model to simultaneously examine both reader and word characteristics and interactions between them that predict the reading of 39 morphologically complex words for 221 middle school students. Results suggest that a reader's ability to read a root word (e.g., "isolate") predicts that…

Just as the mission of the library program evolves from the school's mission, the goals of school librarians' curriculum and teaching evolves from the needs of administrators and classroom teachers. In the 21st-century, these needs are framed by standards such as Common Core State Standards (CCSS). School librarians also have the American…