This paper investigates the impact of assignment to the Accelerating Literacy for Adolescents (ALFA) Lab, an additional semester-long class taken during an elective period, on ninth grade student reading achievement, motivation, and frequency. We conducted a regression discontinuity (RD) study where 1,378 students from diverse high schools in four…

This follow-up report provides a revised Literacy Assignment Analysis Framework that incorporates discussion and teacher scaffolding. This new framework serves as a guidepost for studying sets of assignments across multiple days or weeks within a single classroom, school, or district. A closer look at more assignments from real classrooms provides…

As students progress through school they spend more time reading to obtain information. Reading to learn can be a struggle for any student, but it tends to be a bigger obstacle for students with disabilities. Using text-to-speech applications and extensions is one way to assist students with disabilities who struggle to independently complete…

Prepared for school district and education leaders, "Checking In" is the first in the "Equity in Motion" series, which scrutinizes how issues of equity are translating into the daily activities of schools and educators. Nearly every state has adopted new, more rigorous standards for college and career readiness over the past…

A balanced literacy program provides students with opportunities to interact with texts from a variety of genres. The dawn of the New York State Common Core Learning Standards has paved a natural gateway for students and teachers to regularly engage in reading, discussing, and writing nonfiction. This shift in the standards has inspired educators…

The authors maintain that developing an awareness of the skills and tasks involved in proficient reading is necessary in the middle grades and that success with these skills and tasks develops through peer interaction and meaningful activity, not through teacher-dominated discussion. To that end, in this column, the authors introduce the…

Using interviews and 10 weeks of consecutive lesson plans with supporting documentation, the author analyzes four first-year teachers' assigned in-class and out-of-class reading assignments and their choices and uses of reading strategies they learned in their preservice program. (Contains 2 tables.)

Literacy is a basic element of the discipline of history and of traditional secondary history instruction. However neither the growing body of research on learning with texts nor modern learning theories support the traditional literacy practices that are taking place in many secondary history classrooms. Nor are classroom literacy practices a…

When proficient middle school readers enter high school, it is generally expected that they can successfully comprehend high school text. If any literacy instruction is provided in high school, it is generally limited to students with a history of struggling with reading. Is it a reasonable expectation that successful middle school readers will be…