Improving reading comprehension and fluency in students with mild disabilities has long been a challenge for educators. Technology has provided a host of new possibilities for working with students with mild disabilities. This study incorporated a mixed method to investigate the potential of using E-Readers as an instructional tool. Three features…

Conducted at 10 schools in four communities, this study investigated relationships of young adolescents' reading motivation, reading preference, and reading engagement as influenced by their English Language Arts teachers' use of instructional strategies. Students in eight sixth grade (N = 196) and nine seventh grade (N = 218) classes completed a…

Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) is a period of time given to students to read self-selected materials during their school day. This study examines the effect of participation in a SSR program on reading attitudes and reading achievement of students as measured by the Adolescent Motivation to Read Profile (AMRP) and the Northwest Evaluation…

Struggling adolescent readers are distinct from others in two important ways: (1) They are "adolescents"; and (2) they have a "history" of struggle with reading. Good pedagogy prescribes that effective programs "meet students where they are." For middle-school students, this means meeting them in adolescence.…

An after-school book club, led by the school librarian, was held to test the efficacy of the peritextual literacy framework (PLF) in teaching skills related to critical thinking, problem solving, information literacy, and media literacy. The PLF is an extension of paratext theory developed by Gérard Genette, which provides a typology of the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how engagement, mood and number of assignments completed on computerized differentiated homework using an iPad in a one-to-one mobile device environment influenced the growth index and normalized gain in reading literature benchmark assessments of students in grades five, six, and seven. Furthermore,…

National concern about the reading proficiency of adolescents and the alarming statistics on the literacy achievement of African American males have created much interest in the topic of "motivated literacy" for researchers, policy makers, and educators. African American twelfth graders perform at the same level in reading as White…

The 160 third, seventh, and eleventh-graders involved in this study agreed, almost unanimously, that reading was "important." Participants cited the empowering benefits of reading as they justified this opinion. However, with regards to the enjoyment of reading, fewer middle and high school participants reported "liking"…

This randomized controlled study examines the effects of an intervention, Fusion Reading, on the reading achievement and motivation of adolescent struggling readers. Fusion Reading was implemented in grades 6 through 10 in four middle schools and three high schools from three districts in the southeast and western Michigan. Eligible struggling…

The mixed-method explanatory research design was employed to investigate the effectiveness of the Accelerated Reader (AR) program on middle school students' reading achievement and motivation. A total of 211 sixth to eighth-grade students provided quantitative data by completing an AR Survey. Thirty of the 211 students were randomly selected to…

Two language arts teachers in a small, rural middle school set a goal of improving their reading instruction and ultimately their students' learning. The two teachers implemented Reading Workshop as their new methodology for teaching reading to all six of their 7th and 8th grade classes. Interviews and classroom observations, over the course of…

The study of "Thinking Reader"[R] is a multisite cluster randomized controlled trial. Ninety-two reading/English language arts teachers from 32 elementary and middle schools were randomly assigned within their schools to either the "Thinking Reader"[R] condition or the comparison condition. The analysis sample consisted of 90…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was (a) to describe adolescents' use of the e-readers, (b) to discover if e-readers increase adolescents' intrinsic motivation to read and, if so, why, and (c) to examine the possibility of creating a learner-centered environment for students using e-readers. Five seventh and eighth grade…

This study estimates the effect of one year of Fusion Reading implementation, a multistrategy intervention, builds on the work of the Strategic Instruction Model's Learning Strategies Curriculum and Xtreme Reading by integrating some of the same strategies (e.g., paraphrasing, visual imagery, and self-questioning for information acquisition;…

As college and workplace success becomes increasingly dependent on reading, parents and educators have become more interested in how to engage students in reading. Teachers at a rural Georgia high school have reported that students are reluctant to engage in academic reading. Guided by previous research on the factors that promote or discourage…