Historically, political debates have broken out over how to teach reading in primary schools and infant classrooms. These debates and "reading wars" have often resulted from public concerns and media reportage of a fall in reading standards. They also reflect the importance placed on learning to read by parents, teachers, employers, and…

This study is to examine how participation in Texas public Pre-Kindergarten (Pre-K) is associated with performance on the 3rd Grade State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) Reading assessment. The study focused on five major independent school districts (ISDs) in Texas (Austin ISD, Dallas ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Houston ISD, and San…

The NCAA Read to the Final Four Literacy competition was initiated in a partnership between the Houston Independent School District (HISD), NCAA Team Works®, Houston NCAA Final Four Local Organizing Committee, Houston Public Library, the University of Houston, and CYCLE (Changing Young Children's Lives through Education). The competition was…

The goal of Head Start is to develop the cognitive and social-emotional skills of children from low-income families to prepare them to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. Presently, Houston Independent School District (HISD) collaborates with four federally-funded Head Start agencies: AVANCE, Gulf Coast Community Services Association (GCCSA),…

The authors examined the implementation of a blended learning program for literacy instruction across kindergarten through Grade 5 in a Title I urban elementary school, including a population of students (18%) who are English learners. Student progress in the online component of the blended learning program was a significant predictor of growth in…

What causes the literacy gap and can schools compensate for it? The authors investigated 3 drivers of the gap: preliteracy knowledge, schooling, and the summer vacation. Longitudinal literacy data over 5 time points were collected on 126 five-year-olds attending higher or lower socioeconomic status (SES) schools during their first 15 months of…

Dyslexia in consistent orthographies like German is characterized by dysfluent reading, which is often assumed to result from failure to build up an orthographic lexicon and overreliance on decoding. However, earlier evidence indicates effects of lexical processing at least in some German dyslexic readers. We investigated variations in reading…

This paper examines how policy pressure for increased performance on standardised measures of student achievement influenced the teacher learning practices that arose in a school setting in Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon research and theorising of governing by numbers, and applications to the governance of education, and particularly…

Phonological decoding, defined here as converting the written forms of words (or letter strings) into the phonological forms they represent, has been argued to play an important role in various aspects of L2 learning. Previous studies have emphasised the importance of transfer in L2 decoding, interpretable as the automatic triggering of L1-based…

A typically developing student's perceptions of his or her own capabilities (academic self-concept), is predictive of later academic achievement. However, little is known about academic self-concept in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To understand whether students math self-concept and reading self-concept predicted their performance,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine those components of working memory (WM) that play a significant role in predicting math growth in children who are English language learners (N = 157) with serious math difficulties (MD). Method: A battery of tests was administered in English and Spanish that assessed computation, reading,…

The study tested 4 direct and 28 indirect teacher expectancy effects on students' results in the mathematics and literacy sections of the matriculation test, and their final marks in the 12th-grade mathematics and literacy class. The following were considered as mediators: student self-esteem, their self-expectancy, and time spent learning…

This paper shows how an American International School in Vietnam has been using data and Learning Analytics to find out about students' learning from their assessments and how they use these findings to improve, among other areas, the reading skills of their mostly English as an Additional Language (EAL) student population. The source of data…

We assessed the simple view of reading as a framework for Grade 3 reading comprehension in two ways. We first confirmed that a structural equation model in which word recognition, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension were assessed by multiple measures to inform each latent construct provided an adequate fit to this model in Grade 3.…

Identifying the factor structure of online reading to learn is important for the development of theory, assessment, and instruction. Traditional comprehension models have been developed from, and for, offline reading. This study used online reading to determine an optimal factor structure for modeling online research and comprehension among 426…