This article reviews research related to intensive interventions within a Response to Intervention framework. We review the research from studies that provided different levels of intensity of intervention with the goal of establishing a case that movement through less intensive tiers of intervention may not be an effective and responsible…

For this research, learners did extensive graded reading (EGR) with traditional graded readers, and they also interacted with short graded stories in the liberal arts and sciences (LAS). This study describes the purpose and format of the LAS stories used by hundreds of university students and adult learners in Japan. It summarizes the results of…

The present study explores the impact of an experimental reading intervention focusing on explicit reading strategy instruction and cross-age peer tutoring on third and sixth graders' reading strategy awareness, cognitive and metacognitive reading strategy use, and reading comprehension achievement. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was…

In 1997, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandated that students with disabilities have access to the general education curriculum. Access means more than being exposed to language arts, math, and science; access means academic progress. In addition, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 requires that all students have…

Fluency has been identified as an important outcome of effective reading instruction, and intervention packages utilizing the method of repeated readings have been shown to improve oral reading fluency. In order to improve the efficiency of these intervention packages, more research is needed on the effectiveness of small group reading…

"Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies" is a peer-tutoring program for use in elementary school classrooms to improve student proficiency in reading. Its purpose is to supplement students' existing reading curriculum. "Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies" was developed for use with students with diverse academic needs and has been…

Higher standards, motivation and extra help go hand-in-hand in preparing students for success in the middle grades, high school, further education and careers. This newsletter highlights best practices in more than 20 middle grades and high schools that are meeting the challenge of raising expectations for all students, motivating them and…

This report describes a classroom artifact measure and presents early findings from an efficacy study of WestEd's Reading Apprenticeship (RA) professional development program. The professional development is designed to teach high school teachers how to integrate subject-specific literacy instruction into their regular curricula. The current RA…

Despite educational reforms to increase standards, many American children fail to read at levels that will enable them to compete in higher education and in the global economy. Standardized testing has reported a gradual decline in the reading scores of local second grade elementary students. The purpose of this project study was to create a…

When attempting to determine if an intervention has a causal impact, the "gold standard" of program evaluation is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). In education studies random assignment is rarely feasible at the student level, making RCTs harder to conduct. School-level assignment is more common but this often requires considerable resources…

Special education teachers working with secondary level English language learners (ELLs) with learning disabilities (LD) are often faced with the question of how to provide reading comprehension instruction that meets the needs of this unique group. If a learner has the dual diagnosis of ELL and LD, how does one provide effective instruction? This…

We obtained data from 124 volunteer instructors in adult literacy, using an instrument developed to assess what the volunteers knew about providing reading instruction to adults. Results showed that volunteers with bachelor's degrees or higher and those who had teacher's certificates were significantly more knowledgeable about providing reading…

At the end of first grade, TM did not know the alphabet and could read no words. He could not tap syllables in words, had difficulty producing rhyming words and retrieving the phonological representations of words, and he could not discriminate many phoneme contrasts. He learned letter-sound correspondences first for single-consonant onsets and…

This paper proposes a technique for teaching decoding of the Arabic language to Arab dyslexic students following the multisensory, systematic, explicit phonics approach and based in part on the Orton-Gillingham approach. This technique emphasizes vocabulary controlled, font-modified, cumulative, color-coded reading materials, and orthographic…

This retrospective cross-case analysis compares two fourth-grade language arts teachers' beliefs and practices as they respond to an influx of high-stakes tests, including district-mandated benchmark testing systems. One teacher works in a suburban school, the other in an urban school. Results from the study show that the teachers' beliefs about…