This study investigated the presence of word reading difficulties in a sample of students in Grades 1-4 (n = 357) identified with language and reading comprehension difficulties. This study also examined whether distinct word reading and listening comprehension profiles emerged within this sample and the extent to which these groups varied in…

Reading nonfiction texts with understanding is important to school success, yet many students struggle to do so. This randomized controlled trial extends previous research by contrasting an earlier iteration of a comprehension tutoring program (Comp) against a variant with strategies for transferring learning (Comp+Transfer). Participants were 189…

The purpose of this feasibility study was to examine the potential impact of reading digital interactive e-books, Word Knowledge e-books (WKe-Books), on essential skills that support reading comprehension with third-fifth grade students. Students (N= 425) read two WKe-Books, that taught word learning and comprehension monitoring strategies in the…

David Stephens, a 4th grade teacher in Washington State, was preparing a lesson plan about desert wildlife (all names are pseudonyms). He was planning on assigning his students the chapter book, "Desert Giant: The World of the Saguaro Cactus." The students had divergent knowledge about the topic. For example, Maryam had grown up in…

Few studies have systematically investigated the reading skill profiles of English Learners (ELs) in late elementary school, a critical developmental period for language and literacy and the most common grades for initial identification with specific learning disabilities (O'Connor et al., "Learning Disabilities Research & Practice,"…

Prior research supports the need for elementary-aged students with reading difficulties (RDs) to receive explicit systematic small-group evidence-based reading instruction. Yet for many students, simply receiving evidence-based reading instruction in a small-group setting is insufficient to reach the progress milestones needed to meet grade-level…

Despite a marked increase in the volume of research investigating issues about reading interventions for students with ASD (e.g., Bailey and Arciuli, Rev J Autism Dev Disord 7(2):127-150, 2020; Chiang and Lin, Focus Autism Other Dev Disab 22(4):259-267, 2007), very few studies have examined the current reading practices experienced by children…

This study addressed the effects of Strategies for Teaching Reading, Information, and Vocabulary Effectively (STRIVE), a distributed professional development (PD) model designed to help teachers implement reading comprehension and vocabulary practices in fourth grade social studies classes. Schools (n = 81 schools, n = 235 teachers, n = 4,757…

In this paper, we present iSTART-Early, an intelligent tutoring system that provides automated instruction and practice on higher-order reading comprehension strategies to 3rd and 4th grade students. iSTART-Early provides personalized, interactive, game-based strategy instruction and practice on comprehension strategies (i.e., Ask It, Reword It,…

Nearly 30 years ago, Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin (1990) introduced the "fourth-grade slump" to describe the unexpected deceleration of reading skills between first and fourth grades among children growing up in poverty and low-income households. Advances in our understanding of reading development and how race, racism, or other forms of…

We investigated 2 hypotheses of a recently proposed integrative theoretical model of reading, the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER; Kim, 2017b, 2019): (a) hierarchical relations and (b) dynamic relations (or differential relations) of skills to reading comprehension. Students were assessed on reading comprehension, word reading,…

Teaching vocabulary and reading comprehension during social studies instruction is critical for reading development and the acquisition of content knowledge. This study systematically investigated how elementary teachers integrate vocabulary and reading comprehension instruction during social studies teaching, as well as the extent to which this…

Speech technology (automated speech recognition -- ASR and text-to-speech) offers great promise in the field of automated literacy and reading tutors for children. Students in third and fourth grades struggle with generating longer strings of text on a QWERTY keyboard because they still "hunt and peck" for AQ1 the letters and symbols…

This study examined the amount and types of narrative instruction (i.e., story comprehension, oral storytelling, and story writing instruction) that general education English language arts teachers provide to students in Grades 1 through 4. The research team conducted 121, [approximately]30-minute classroom observations. Educators were asked to…

Purpose: This study examines the narrative language and reading outcomes of monolingual and bilingual students who received instruction with the Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL) program, a narrative language intervention. Method: The main effects of the SKILL program were evaluated in a randomized controlled trial in which…