This paper details how a 7-month reading-focused professional development initiative, centered on the assessment-to-instruction cycle, supported teachers' growth by combining small group sessions with related individualized literacy coaching. Analysis of participants' experiences revealed the significance of differentiated professional learning in…

Lead is a neurotoxin that has been shown to have a long and lasting impact on the brains, bodies, and behaviors of those who are poisoned. It also has a greater presence in communities with high levels of poverty and minority populations. Compounded over time, the effects of lead poisoning, even at low levels of exposure, impact a child's…

Reading underachievement among adolescent students, particularly in urban areas, has been well documented in the literature. This reality points to two problems: Schools possess neither the capacity needed to prepare students for higher education and the workforce, nor the ability to help students view literacy as a tool for critical thinking,…

Although the four-day school week originated in 1936, it was not widely implemented until 1973 when there was a need to conserve energy and reduce operating costs. This study investigated how achievement tests scores of schools with a four-day school week compared with schools with a traditional five-day school week. The study focused on student…

Researchers have long acknowledged the important role that vocabulary plays in assisting reading comprehension. Because of the importance of vocabulary, it is necessary to determine how to ensure that all students are making adequate vocabulary gains. The research base for the best ways to instruct students in robust vocabulary is strong. The…

School systems across the country continuously seek to find ways to increase academic achievement at all grades. Possessing the ability to read is one of the keys to academic success; not being able to presents many challenges. Union County Public Schools and the state of North Carolina expect students leaving their kindergarten year to be able to…

This article synthesizes the literature comparing at-risk children designated as responders and low responders to interventions in reading. The central question addressed in this review is whether individual differences in reading-related skills at pretest predict responders at posttest across a variety of interventions and sets of criteria for…

This study presents findings from an investigation of the impact of teachers who graduated from a fully online master's degree program with training in pedagogy and a content-specialization in elementary reading and literacy (oERL) on reading achievement in a large urban public school system in the northwestern United States. The research team…

A wide variety of school-based physical activity contexts have been recently associated with various measures of academic performance. Of these studies, a small number employing objective measures of student fitness have identified a relationship with academic achievements. However, even among these studies, the fitness-academic link has not been…

The authors used a large sample of children (N [is approximately equal to] 7,400) participating in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) to estimate kindergarten children's academic achievement growth trajectories in reading and mathematics. The authors were particularly interested in whether the growth trajectories…

Using the off-level test scores of more than 250,000 students who participated in talent search testing from 2000 to 2008, this study examined if previously reported gender differences in students' performances in math versus verbal areas as well as the reported ratios of males and females for specific scoring levels still existed across years.…

The purpose of this study was to explore patterns of within-group variability in the emergent literacy skills of preschoolers who are at risk for academic difficulties. We used the person-centered approach of cluster analysis to identify profiles of emergent literacy skills, taking into account both oral language and code-related skills.…

Students who are deaf or hard of hearing (SDHH) often need accommodations to participate in large-scale standardized assessments. One way to bridge the gap between the language of the test (English) and a student's linguistic background (often including American Sign Language [ASL]) is to present test items in ASL. The specific aim of this project…

An analysis of large and influential published reviews of research pertaining to the reading acquisition of young struggling readers in the early years of schooling was undertaken. The reviews were selected on the basis that they either had been commissioned by federal governments or had been conducted by reputable research institutions and had…

The present study used two letter detection tasks, the classic missing letter effect paradigm and a single word versus familiar word compound version of this paradigm, to study bottom-up and top-down processes involved in reading in normally achieving as compared to low achieving elementary school readers. The research participants were children…