This report summarizes Austin Independent School District's 2008-2009 school year student success initiative efforts to support students who are academically at risk in reading and math.

Preventing reading difficulties in the early grades has been a topic of interest for more than a decade. Research has clearly delineated the components needed for early literacy programs to be effective in teaching nearly all children to learn to read. Teacher educators have a responsibility to ensure that candidates gain extensive knowledge about…

Preschool children can learn to read in a way that is developmentally and culturally appropriate if they are presented with the necessary supports. Provocative activities, enrichment centers of excellence, and creating print-rich environments for young children are described. Includes a chart listing the critical elements of centers of…

The "Voyager Universal Literacy System"[R] is a core reading program designed to help students learn to read at or above grade level by the end of the third grade. This program uses strategies such as individual reading instruction, higher-level comprehension activities, problem solving, and writing. Students are also exposed to…

In December of 2006 and again in February of 2007, fifty Literacy Professors representing almost every college and university in Michigan met in a collegial forum to discuss and advocate for all students involved in reading instruction/education. This advocacy spans students from prekindergarten through college undergraduates and graduates. The…

The phenomenon of using progress monitoring data to inform literacy instruction was explored in the context of four schools during their 2nd year of Reading First implementation. Open-ended interviews and surveys from 10 teachers, purposefully selected for maximum variation in effectiveness and skills and resistance to using data to inform…

This is a description of the evaluation of Reading Recovery (RR). RR is an early reading intervention serving about 125,000 children every year in about 8,000 U.S. schools. Its 15,000 teachers submit data on every child to the National Data Evaluation Center, which produces a report for each school, district and university involved with RR.…

The effects of fluency intervention strategies on students fluency rate, comprehension, and word identification were the focus of this study. Both the experimental and control groups were first grade classes, taught by the same teacher, at Elder Primary School in Sandersville, Georgia. The study was conducted over a 15-week period. The results of…

An innovative, technology-enabled elementary school literacy program was implemented in a large urban school district. The program revolved around having student-adult pen pals read the same books and correspond about them. Statistical comparisons showed that program classrooms outperformed students in comparison classrooms on the SAT-9…

The founders of the family academy developed a powerful curriculum for struggling readers. The element of the powerful program that was born from research, from experience and from staying carefully attuned to young children is presented.

The aim of this research study was to compare two strategies of sight word instruction in children attending a school for learners with moderate to severe mental disability, namely modified orthography (MO) and modified orthography where an association was made between the modification and the traditional orthography (MO/TO) together with a…

This article focuses on a concept that has rarely been studied in beginning reading research--a child's concept of word in text. Recent examinations of this phenomenon suggest that a child's ability to match spoken words to written words while reading--a concept of word in text--plays a pivotal role in early reading development. In this article,…

The purposes of this article are to discuss several approaches to reading instruction and to explore how students' learning-style preferences impact upon their achievement. The authors recommend learning-styles specific interventions to guide all students in their journey to literacy. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper exposes how function words and their prosodic features play a part in learning and teaching to read in the early years. It sketches the place that function words have in the grammar of English and describes their phonological features, especially their weak stress and its role in the prosodic quality of sentences. It considers the ways…

Since 2002, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has funded more than 400 research grants through the National Center for Education Research. This document lists the publications that have resulted from these projects. Publications from IES grantees include articles intended for scientific audiences, as well as articles written for general…