Education reform in the United States is heavily regulated and has undergone various iterations in the past several decades. With each passing legislation, government mandates and educational initiatives become the focus of reform. School districts must constantly find ways to keep up with increasing state and federal accountability standards.…

Background: This study examined how children's ability to understand what they read on screens is impacted by two specific digital features: hovering hyperlinks and scrolling. Methods: The participants were 75 English-speaking children (M = 9.90 years, SD = 0.90 years) in Grades 3 to 5 who participated in an online research study. Using a…

In this preregistered study, we used latent change score models to address two research aims: (1) whether preschool-aged children's language gains, over a year of early childhood education, were associated with later performance on state-mandated, literacy-focused kindergarten readiness and Grade 3 reading achievement assessments; and (2) whether…

Background: Although Zimbabwe has performed quite well on Grade 6 SACMEQ literacy assessments compared to other African countries, reading levels are generally low and there is little research on reading literacy in Zimbabwean primary schools. Aim: Grade 3 and 4 learners' reading comprehension (RC), accuracy and speed in oral reading fluency (ORF)…

This improvement project was designed to ensure students enrolled in elementary schools with a high poverty index received literacy instructional strategies that promoted literacy achievement. When analyzing Graham County School data, I noticed third-grade students attending high poverty elementary schools were not achieving literacy success at…

Background: Dyslexia is a specific reading disability characterized by word recognition difficulties that can qualify a student for special education services under the "Individuals with Disabilities Education Act" (IDEA; 2004; Yudin, 2015). As of 2024, 49 US states have legislation defining dyslexia and enumerating for schools…

Purpose: This longitudinal study examined the contribution of preschool morphological awareness to word reading skills and reading comprehension, as well as to the developmental change of reading ability beyond other well-established oral language and cognitive predictors. A distinction was made between the domains of inflectional and derivational…

Facility with learning from multiple text documents is critical for college and career readiness. However, children with reading difficulties and disabilities have been largely excluded from research on multiple document comprehension. Accordingly, little is known about how children with reading difficulties and disabilities perform on…

Text reading fluency (TRF) is a common reading intervention target in second and third grade. TRF requires the integration of several skills that result in several pathways to dysfluent reading. However, when applying the drill-down approach to intervention targeting, practitioners are guided to consider students' rate and accuracy when reading…

Technologies that enable individualization for students have significant potential in special education. Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) refers to digital assessments that automatically adjust their difficulty level based on students' abilities, allowing for personalized, efficient, and accurate measurement. This article examines whether CAT…

Background: Early-grade reading proficiency is well documented as in important factor for later academic success. Researchers and educators consider the achievement of reading proficiency by the end of grade three to be crucial to future academic success and financial independence (Hein et al., 2013; La Paro & Pianta, 2000; Singh, 2013). As…

Reading comprehension tests involve not only reading passages and answering questions but also making choices such as the test-taking strategy to use, whether to search passages for answers, and where to begin searching. We examined the associations between student characteristics, passage type, test-taking strategies, and students' time searching…

Early identification and instruction aimed at addressing potential reading difficulties is the key to preventing prolonged difficulties in learning to read and ensuring that all students are reading with proficiency by the end of third grade. Tier 1 core reading curricula needs to be: (a) evidence based, (b) systematic and structured, (c)…

Academic language and its associations with school success have been established in many prior studies. However, the scholarship lacks research on the mechanisms that constitute these relations. This study investigates the mediating role of motivational-­affective variables, specifically reading self-concept and reading enjoyment, in relations…

We report results from children learning to read in one of four different languages: Croatian, English, Estonian and Swedish. The languages all have an alphabetical script but vary greatly on the dimension deep-shallow (or complexity-simplicity, or opacity-transparency), i.e., how close orthography and phonology are related. These languages also…