This study documents the implementation of research-based strategies to minimize the occurrence of reading difficulties in a first-grade population. Three strategies were implemented: (a) A system of progress monitoring was used to assess student progress and skill acquisition; (b) instruction was characterized by high intensity through the use of…

Data gathered from 25 rural public school districts in Texas during 2002-2003 were used to assess the impact of educator professional development and technology-intensive classroom learning activities on first- and second-grade students' reading achievement. Students from 18 school districts received the treatment while students from 7 randomly…

There is so much more that goes into literacy coaching that we do not think about when working with colleagues. When we think about literacy coaching, we think about someone who comes into our classrooms and provides support for our instruction. High-quality literacy coaching requires that there be superior levels of overt assessment and covert…

"Failure Free Reading" is a language development program designed to improve vocabulary, fluency, word recognition, and reading comprehension for Kindergarten through grade 12 students who score in the bottom 15% on standardized tests and who have not responded to conventional beginning reading instruction. The three key dimensions of…

This article discusses teachers' use of hand-held computers in a rural New Mexico district to assess student's reading progress. With the help of a federal Reading First grant, the district began using the DIBELS assessments across its elementary schools along with the mCLASS: DIBELS assessment and reporting system. The district's experience helps…

In this study we investigated reading development from kindergarten to third grade for 1,913 economically disadvantaged children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. Characteristics of the child, the family, classroom instruction, and school composition were used to model influences from multiple levels of children's…

For the past few years the authors have worked in urban public elementary schools to implement literacy instruction that emphasizes higher-level reading, writing, and thinking, while also maintaining instructional focus on the skills of decoding, word recognition, and fluency. Their efforts have involved implementing an initiative called In2Books.…

An alternating treatments design was used to assess the effects of a constant time delay (CTD) procedure and a cover-copy-compare (CCC) procedure on three students' acquisition, subsequent maintenance, and adaptation (i.e., application) of acquired spelling words to reading passages. Students were randomly presented two trials of word lists from…

James Gee has suggested that video games can teach us important lessons about learning and that we can learn about teaching from these games. Reading research and the words of the author's daughter are the basis of an exploration of the learning principles Gee identifies. He explains that video games are successful in engaging children and…

Students' literacy achievement tends to lessen as they progress from elementary to middle level to high school as measured by state and national assessments. To ensure that secondary school students retain their literacy skills, many states and districts have created the position of literacy coach for middle and high schools. Literacy coaches are…

There are a number of principles that teachers of reading and administrators need to keep in mind to ensure that Response to Intervention (RTI) enables struggling literacy learners to achieve success within the provisions of the reauthorized Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA). The author argues for evidence-based RTI…

The current study replicated Gickling and Armstrong (1978) by using curriculum-based assessment for instructional design to match reading materials to skill levels of three third-graders who were struggling readers with low levels of on-task behavior. Difficulty levels of the reading passages were grouped according to ratios of known and unknown…

This study compared the reading achievement levels of 323 third grade students from a Caribbean school district receiving instruction from three different programs. Students were identified as at risk with a 95% minority enrollment, 100% free lunch and transportation, and the lowest NAEP test scores in the nation. Total standardized test scores…

In this article, the author shares her experience in teaching sixth grade Spanish at Autrey Mill Middle School in Alpharetta, Georgia. Through the school's implementation of the middle school teaming concept, the author and her colleague on the sixth grade team have teamed up with other teachers in order to provide reading and writing…

An alternating treatments design was used to compare the effectiveness of activity-based intervention and didactic instruction to teach sight word reading to four young children with developmental delays attending an inclusive child care centre. Following the collection of baseline measures, the two interventions, counterbalanced for word lists…