Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; n[subscript female] = 264,…

This study measured the effectiveness of Readable English, a reading fluency and comprehension program, on underperforming sixth, seventh, and eighth grade rural, American English-speaking students over the course of one school year. Students were randomly assigned to either the intervention condition (n = 167) or the typical practice condition (n…

Automaticity in word recognition has been hypothesized to be important in reading development (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985). However, when predicting educational outcomes, it is difficult to isolate the influence of automatic word recognition from factors such as processing speed or knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences.…

Over a 12-week period, the researchers implemented explicit and systematic reading instruction using grade-level fiction to evaluate the effects on the oral reading fluency and comprehension of seventh and eighth grade urban students at risk of academic failure. Ten students in the experimental group were provided systematic instruction consisting…

The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of systematic explicit instruction of a questioning strategy for improving the text comprehension of middle school students. Specifically, the reading comprehension of six 8th grade students was investigated to determine whether the questioning strategy, QtA, lead to an increase in the…

The main purpose of this study was to bridge the gap between the literature on cognitive variables related to English literacy learning skills, as suggested by the simple view of reading, and the literature on sociocultural variables, specifically acculturation. The sample consisted of 94 Chinese immigrant adolescents from grades 7-12 in Waterloo…

Turning around chronically low-performing schools requires a multifaceted school-wide, systematic effort that includes strong leadership and data-based decision making. School-wide efforts to turn-around low-performing schools should address the academic, social, and behavioral needs of all students. One evidence-based, systematic school-wide…

Students with learning disabilities face real reading challenges. Research into the reading performance of culturally diverse students indicates improved reading performance for culturally diverse students when text matches students' cultural perspective. This quasiexperimental research investigates whether Caucasian and African American students…