Early literacy is a key developmental milestone for succeeding in school, yet far too many children in America, particularly the most socially vulnerable, are not meeting this key milestone. For example, NAEP data from 2013 shows that over 80% of Black and Latinx students are below proficient in reading by the end of fourth grade, as compared to…

Aiming to verify the predictive value of oral narrative structure on reading acquisition, we followed 253 children (first and second graders) during an entire school year, assessing oral narratives and reading performances in five sessions. Transcriptions of oral narratives were represented as word-recurrence graphs to measure connectedness…

Background: Young children clearly know quite a bit about the conventions of written language; for instance, 5-year-old children are sensitive to the fact that words tend to include both consonants and vowels, rather than just one or the other. The core theoretical debate lies in whether this understanding of sub-lexical orthographic regularities…

This cross-lagged study examined the classroom-level associations between the reading performance of first-grade students (N = 537) and observed literacy instruction activities in classrooms (N = 30) in the autumn and spring terms. The multilevel analyses indicated that lower average word reading skills in the classrooms (i.e., there were more…

The purpose of this randomized control trial (RCT) was to examine the impact of one-to-one high-dosage tutoring on reading achievement of kindergarten and first grade students, many at risk of reading failure. This nearly two-year study collected reading assessment data from 185 students, from across 13 classrooms, randomly assigned to either the…

There is a need for Early Childhood Education prior to attending elementary school, to create a preschool age preclusion for school readiness. This study contributes to the current body of research on the impact of Early Childhood Education on reading achievement. The purpose of this study was to determine if attending a preschool program made an…

Background/Context: Both correlational and experimental evidence suggests that having access to books can be a key resource for accelerating the literacy outcomes for children. Results from a 20-year study across 27 nations by Evans, Kelley, Sikora, and Treiman (2010), suggest that children growing up in homes with many books obtain 3 years more…

The Learning Forward Academy is Learning Forward's flagship deep learning experience, committed to increasing educator and leader capacity and improving results for students in the ever-changing landscape of education. For over 30 years, the academy has supported the problem-based learning of teachers, teacher leaders, instructional coaches,…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the implementation of the Wilson's Language Training program, Fundations, influences the reading growth of first-grade graders. Reading proficiency at the school in this study was quite low at six percent. During the intervention, emphasis was placed on phonemic awareness. The Wilson's Fundations…

The purpose of this report was to evaluate the Lalilo software program. This large-scale quasi-experimental study independently conducted by Lehigh University reported that K-1 students in schools using Lalilo increased their early literacy skills at a greater rate than students in similar schools that did not use Lalilo.

Having two teachers work collaboratively in the same class has been suggested as a possible solution to several instructional challenges, including the inclusion of students with special needs in mainstream classrooms and as part of school-wide prevention models to increase student achievement. In this, shared responsibility between teachers is…

The nature of the literacy assessments valued in the persistent accountability climate within U.S. public education, coupled with an increasingly polarized discourse around what counts as the science of reading (SOR), have resulted in instructional gatekeeping that privileges constrained skill teaching and learning in K-3 settings. The gatekeeper…

This independent quasi-experimental study conducted by WestEd reported that Lalilo had a large significant positive impact on students' oral reading fluency skills. This is an important outcome because fluency is both a critical component of literacy and a strong predictor of later reading success. Effects were particularly strong for students…

Reading Recovery (RR) is a constructivist reading intervention used to provide tier 3 instruction to struggling readers in the first grade. The program has been previously evaluated and found effective by Evidence for ESSA (John Hopkins University), What Works Clearing House (intervention report institute for education sciences 2013), and in a…

State legislators recognized that students in the United States continue to struggle with reading and have begun implementing laws requiring schools to use science of reading-aligned curriculum when teaching reading (Schwartz, 2022). Many students lack the foundational skills to even begin learning how to read in grades K-3 (Kuhfeld et al., 2022).…