Low achievement in reading is a concern in a suburban school in the southeastern part of Florida. In an attempt to combat this issue, the school's administration has focused on teaching disciplinary literacy in content area classes, specifically social studies. In addition, the state standards also require that social studies teachers meet the…

The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Education Policy." Contents include: (1) Texas Legislature Concentrates on…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the relationship of language proficiency (WIDA) on the performance of third, fourth, and fifth grade English language learners who were administered the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments during the 2017-2018 assessment year. The Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) reading and…

This study investigated early indicators of Spanish-speaking English learners (ELs) at risk for reading difficulties at the end of Grade 2 by examining their early bilingual oral language development, taking into account language of academic instruction. Standardized measures of reading and narrative samples were collected in English and Spanish…

Research across the decades has confirmed that effective school leadership is associated with better outcomes for students and schools. A high-quality school leader affects dozens of teachers and hundreds or thousands of students. It is a pivotal role. From 2011 to 2016, The Wallace Foundation, through its Principal Pipeline Initiative (PPI),…

While educators and researchers agree on the crucial role of literacy motivation for performance, research on methods for accurately assessing adolescent reading motivation is still uncommon. The most used reading motivation instruments do not attend to the multiple content areas in which adolescents read. The present study examines a new…

Children's worrying about their academic performance has profound implications for their learning and wellbeing in school. Understanding the contextual and psychological antecedents of students' worry thus represents an important area of research. Drawing on Eccles and colleagues' expectancy-value theory and Pekrun's control-value theory and using…

This study examined the effects of the SRA FLEX Literacy (FLEX) program provided to 44 middle school students considered at risk for reading failure as compared to their peers who were not at risk in reading (N = 197) who received instruction in the Holt Elements of Literature series. Two outcome measures were used to judge the effects of the…

School counselors play critical roles in partnerships with faith-based organizations that provide valuable programs for students with economic challenges. This study evaluated the effects of a counselor-led, faith-based, school-family-community partnership on student reading achievement in a high-poverty elementary school. Results indicated…

Theoretical models of word recognition suggest that knowing what a word means makes it easier to learn how to decode it. We tested this hypothesis with at-risk young students, a group that often responds poorly to conventional decoding instruction in which word meaning is not addressed systematically. A total of 53 first graders received explicit…

This article examines inequality in different dimensions of student academic achievement (math, science, and reading) by family background and school context in three East Asian (Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea) and three Western (United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic) nations. Building on Hauser (2009), we develop a novel…

Enjoyment of reading, diversity of reading and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies are cognitive and affective variables pertaining to three facets of reading engagement for students to read happily, widely and skilfully. These have been found to be related to effectiveness in reading instruction. They together form a focus for this…

A recent movement in teacher education research encompasses working with and through theory. In response to the call from Jackson and Mazzei (2013) to use theory to think with data and use data to think with theory, the author hopes to portray the complexities of teacher learning by avoiding models of teacher learning and development that tend to…

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental, descriptive study was to determine if participation in project-based learning developed the understanding students need to transfer their knowledge and skills to achieve higher composite and reading scores, as well as demonstrate the ability to read increasingly complex texts on the ACT Aspire as…

Students with Emotional Behavioral Disorders (EBD) are considered the most challenging students to include in the regular education environment. Self-contained classrooms are typically the preferred classroom for students with EBD in comparison to inclusion programs because of the problematic behaviors that are associated with these students.…