The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of cover, copy, and compare (CCC) procedures on spelling performance with two students. The participants were two elementary students enrolled in a self-contained behavior intervention classroom. A multiple baseline design across participants was employed to evaluate the effects of CCC…

This exploratory study examined the ways in which fourth grade students, in an urban setting, responded to a nine-week implementation of Marzano's Six Step Vocabulary Process. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the direct instruction of vocabulary and the effects on student achievement as measured by Vocabulary…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a Direct Instruction summer reading intervention program designed to minimize summer reading regression. The summer intervention program targeted the lowest quartile of readers in grades kindergarten through third grade from a suburban school district over a three-week period before…

When children start to learn to read English, they benefit from learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences. As they become more skilled, they use larger graphophonic units and morphemes in word recognition and spelling. We hypothesized that these 2 types of units in decoding make independent contributions to children's reading comprehension and…

Many children with intellectual disability, including children with Down syndrome, have teachers who are unsure what type of reading instruction is likely to increase outcomes for their students. Effectiveness of two commercially available, evidence-based reading interventions was evaluated through 3 multiple baseline across participants,…

Although vocabulary plays an important role in literacy and content instruction, there is a paucity of research identifying effective methods for teaching vocabulary. One promising strategy is morphemic analysis, which involves breaking words into morphemes, the smallest meaningful parts of words, and teaching students the meanings of those parts.…

The Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies (HELPS) Program was developed by integrating 8 evidence-based fluency-building instructional strategies into a structured program that can be feasibly implemented by educators. The HELPS Program has been shown in previous research to significantly improve elementary-aged students' reading…

Despite the recent attention to text reading fluency, few studies have studied the construct of oral reading rate and accuracy in connected text in a model that simultaneously examines many of the important variables in a multi-leveled fashion with young readers. Using Structural Equation Modeling, this study examined the measurement and…

It is well documented that many successful individuals are challenged by cognitive-based disabilities that impact their performance in school and on tests. While commonly believed to be related mostly to the constructs of processing speed or reading fluency, there are other aspects of cognition that affect how an individual interacts with the…

The purpose of this study was to improve the utility of retell protocols by more clearly identifying the testing conditions under which students demonstrate better performance. The research questions concern whether the wording of the initial prompt, the inclusion of a follow-up prompt, or the opportunity to silently re-read the passage is related…

Some students are exiting first grade reading at less than adequate fluency rates at one rural elementary school. Poor fluency can lead to literacy problems later in their education. An appropriate system to address each student's fluency needs will help teachers to better serve students. A framework based on the theories of Rasinski's fluency…

Parent tutoring has been successfully used to increase children's oral reading fluency. However, commonly used procedures pose a challenge for parents who are not proficient in reading or who speak English as a second language. A taped reading program that included listening passage preview, repeated reading, and performance feedback was developed…

This study investigated the accuracy of several early literacy measures that have been used in research and practice for first grade reading screening. A set of measures, Word Identification Fluency (WIF), Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency, were administered as screening measures with 138 first grade…

The relationship between reading fluency and comprehension was evaluated in five 4th-grade students. These students were identified as being at risk of not meeting yearly goals in reading fluency and comprehension based on fall benchmark assessment data. A brief intervention assessment was used to determine which intervention components would be…

The study concerns reading development and its precursors in a transparent orthography. Dutch children differing in family risk for dyslexia were followed from kindergarten through fifth grade. In fifth grade, at-risk dyslexic (n = 22), at-risk non-dyslexic (n = 45), and control children (n = 12) were distinguished. In kindergarten, the at-risk…