When students do not score well on standardized tests, their school can suffer. In an attempt to improve standardized test scores, a district placed students into a program called Seminar to help them work on weak areas of content through personalized instruction. The purpose of this project study was to assess if the Seminar program had a…

Reading performance among Grade 11 students has been low in the local school district under study. Schools within the boundaries of that setting have implemented research-based interventions to curb this problem of poor reading performance. A quasi-experimental, causal-comparative study was conducted to investigate the effect of Marzano's…

This dissertation addresses two research questions: 1. Do states misrepresent their progress on their own state assessments? 2. If states do distort their progress, are their predictors to suggest why this distortion occurs? The first research question requires that distortion be defined. For the purposes of this dissertation I calculated the…

Scope and Method of Study: This naturalistic inquiry case study explored a selected pre-kindergarten program and the extent of its provision for school readiness through the lens of General Systems Theory. Assessment results from kindergarten students at three separate elementary schools were analyzed, interviews were completed with select early…

The purpose of this study was to employ value-added methodology to determine which placement setting offered the ninth grade 2009 special education high school cohort the most academic growth as measured on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). This particular cohort was selected because it was the most recent cohort for which 3…

Reading is an active process where readers sometimes have difficulty understanding what they read. Ultimately, readers are required to combine the meaning of each sentence in a text in order to achieve text-level comprehension. Otherwise, the reader is going to have great difficulty with text-level comprehension. Factors such as sentence length…

For the past 15 years, the New Zealand government has initiated major efforts to reduce persistently large inequities in achievement outcomes in literacy education, including the development of a national literacy strategy. The aim of this study was to provide an analysis of the factors that have contributed to the failure of this strategy and…

This study examines the effect of 30 min of small group explicit instruction on reading outcomes for first-grade Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) at risk of reading difficulties. Participants were 78 ELs from seven schools who were receiving Spanish only, or Spanish and English, whole group reading instruction in first grade. Students were…

The ratings and rationales primary-age urban learners gave culturally relevant reading passages was the focus of this descriptive study. First- and second-grade students each read 30 researcher-developed passages reflecting the students' immediate and historical backgrounds. The students rated the passages and gave a reason for their ratings. A…

The SPOKES (Supporting Parents on Kids Education in Schools) programme is a ten-week intervention for parents designed to help struggling readers in Year 1. The programme teaches parents strategies to support their children's reading such as listening to children read, pausing to let them work out words, and praising them when they concentrate and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE) program on elementary special education students' academic achievement (reading and math) and social-emotional learning. EASE was a 5-year program providing professional development and instruction in the arts in 10 New York City special education…

This research investigated the word reading performance of Persian speaking dyslexic children through the use of a reading test. For this reason, 15 Persian elementary developmental dyslexic student with the mean age of 9.6, (SD= 1.5) and 15 Persian unimpaired elementary student with the mean age of 9.6 (SD= 1.4) were compared. The performance of…

Interpreting the image-language interface in multimodal texts is now well recognized as a crucial aspect of reading comprehension in a number of official school syllabi such as the recently published Australian Curriculum: English (ACE). This article outlines the relevant expected student learning outcomes in this curriculum and draws attention to…

The Test of Everyday Reading Comprehension (TERC) has recently been presented as an addition to the armoury of tests available for assessing the skills of low-progress readers. While comparison data for students of different ages are presented together with evidence for high test reliability, there is, as yet, no published evidence for its…

This article explores the relationship between reading strategy use and reading proficiency among 121 adult ESL learners. Reading strategy use was measured by the SORS, and reading proficiency was determined by the CASAS Reading Test and BEST Literacy Test. Findings of the study reveal that (a) adult ESL learners are active strategies users; (b)…