One of the greatest challenges of an elementary school teacher is equipping students with comprehension strategies that transfer to all content areas. With stable levels of reading achievement over the last two decades in the United States, it is necessary that further research be conducted on methods of increasing students' comprehension…

Reading words and developing larger vocabularies are critical parts of reading proficiency, but these checkpoints do not have significance until young students grasp the meaning behind words. While teachers and the school culture can improve early reading proficiency, legislatures and state education agencies can support such efforts by…

Students not reading proficiently by the end of 3rd grade are four times more likely than proficient readers to drop out of high school. This fact and other recent research on the importance of early literacy skills have culminated in an intense focus on improving 3rd-grade reading proficiency. The challenges of improving literacy are, in turn,…

In this study we investigated reading development from kindergarten to third grade for 1,913 economically disadvantaged children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. Characteristics of the child, the family, classroom instruction, and school composition were used to model influences from multiple levels of children's…