Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences, a 750-student middle school in upper north Philadelphia, is a showcase for a comprehensive approach to dropout prevention. It produced such dramatic improvements in attendance, behavior, and course-passing rates last year that it's being tried this year in 11 more middle or high schools in Chicago, Los…

The effect of articulatory suppression on second language (L2) visual sentence comprehension and its relation to L2 reading proficiency and lower level processing efficiency were investigated in a series of experiments using 64 college-level Japanese English as a second language learners as participants. The results supported the hypothesis that…

Reading literacy of fourth-grade students in Hong Kong showed a remarkable improvement from 2001 to 2006 as shown by international PIRLS studies. This study identified various aspects of the teacher factor contributing to the significant improvement among students. A total of 4,712 students and 144 teachers from 144 schools were randomly selected…

The study participants were 197 deaf or hard-of-hearing students with mild to profound hearing loss who attended general education classes for 2 or more hours per day. We obtained scores on standardized achievement tests of math, reading, and language/writing, and standardized teacher's ratings of academic competence annually, for 5 years,…

Econometric studies suggest that student achievement may be improved if high-performing teachers are substituted for low-performing teachers. Drawing upon a recent study linking teacher performance on licensure exams with gains in student achievement, an analysis was conducted to determine the cost-effectiveness of requiring teacher applicants to…

Purpose: In this study, the authors evaluated the contribution made by dialect shifting to reading achievement test scores of African American English (AAE)-speaking students when controlling for the effects of socioeconomic status (SES), general oral language abilities, and writing skills. Method: Participants were 165 typically developing…

664 relatively low achieving first grade children were recruited into a longitudinal study. Measures of peer academic reputation (PAR), peer acceptance, teacher-rated academic engagement and achievement, and reading and math achievement were obtained in Year 2, when the majority of students were in second grade, and 1 year later. Measures of…

In this lesson, a ready-to-teach cooperative reading activity, students learn about the effects of plastics in our environment, specifically that certain petrochemicals act as artificial estrogens and impact hormonal activities. Much of the content in this lesson was synthesized from recent medical research about the impact of xenoestrogens and…

This investigation examined associations between early adolescents' relationships with parents and teachers and indicators of school-adjustment. Participants were primarily students of color (91% Latino) in a low-income urban environment, and analyses were conducted to examine the relative contributions of parent-child and teacher-student…

In the summer of 2007, the authors had the opportunity to lead a group of Hofstra University students, pre- and inservice, undergraduate and graduate, elementary and art teachers, to Sorrento, Italy, for interdisciplinary courses in both literacy and art education. The culminating project, a shadow theater play and performance, brought together…

Data from the 10-year follow-up of the 1970 British Births Survey were examined for associations between motor performance and dyslexia. Five tests of motor performance were used: (a) balancing on one leg, (b) throwing a ball in the air, clapping and catching it, (c) walking backwards, (d) sorting matches and (e) graphaesthesia (recognizing shapes…

The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric integrity of the "Test of Silent Contextual Reading Fluency" (TOSCRF) by D. D. Hammill, J. L. Wiederholt, and E. A. Allen (2006). The TOSCRF is a recently published assessment of reading fluency for ages 7 years 0 months to 18 years 11 months that can be administered individually or in a…

The effects of geographic variations in cost of living and family income on children's academic achievement and social competence in first grade (mean age = 86.9 months) were examined, mediated through material hardship, parental investments, family stress, and school resources. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten…

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) "Special Education at a Glance," which includes a copy of the "Guide to Planning and Assessing School-Based Special Education Programs," provides in a single document, information about the special education population at each Montgomery County (Maryland) public school, including…

This article reports on a reading intervention project undertaken in a high poverty primary school in Gauteng where reading levels in both the home language, Northern Sotho, and in English were very low. Some of the factors associated with school effectiveness (SE) are first examined and thereafter the nature of the reading intervention programme…