Curriculum-based measurements (CBM) are used in schools to screen students for academic difficulties. Oral reading fluency curriculum-based measures (CBM-R) are the most popular, yet several studies have identified predictive bias in CBM-Rs in relation to key variables (e.g., race, sex). Despite a massive increase in the use of these measures as…

Cognitive predictors of reading are well known, but less is understood about the roles of "noncognitive" factors, including emotional variables such as anxiety. While "math" anxiety has been a focus of study, its analogue in the reading literature is understudied. We assessed struggling fourth and fifth graders (n = 272) on…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships among (1) special education teachers' knowledge for teaching reading fluency, (2) the specific instructional practices they used in fluency instruction, and (3) gains of students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) on a performance measure of oral reading fluency (ORF). Analyses…

Educators have been faced with increasing demands to not only achieve, but also improve reading scores across the nation. Educational research of literacy abilities and reading achievement performance on state assessments have been researched and documented for decades. However, there has been little research on middle school literacy and state…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between oral language, literacy skills, age, and dialect density (DD) of African American children residing in two different geographical regions of the United States (East Coast and Midwest). Method: Data were obtained from 64 African American school-age children between the…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether using a multiple-measure framework yielded better classification accuracy than oral reading fluency (ORF) or maze alone in predicting pass/fail rates for middle-school students on a large-scale reading assessment. Participants were 178 students in Grades 7 and 8 from a Midwestern school district.…

Although instruction has been shown to be effective at increasing vocabulary knowledge and comprehension, factors most important for promoting the acquisition of novel vocabulary are less known. In addition, few vocabulary studies have utilized models that simultaneously take into account child-level, word-level, and instructional factors to…

This study rank ordered the contributive importance of several predictors of listening comprehension for third, seventh, and tenth graders. Principal components analyses revealed that a three-factor solution with fluency, reasoning, and working memory components provided the best fit across grade levels. Dominance analyses indicated that fluency…

The present study examined the impact of the Simultaneous Multisensory Institute for Language Arts (SMILA) approach on the reading proficiency of 39 students between the ages of 7-11 participating in a summer reading program. The summer reading clinic draws students from the surrounding community which is located in a large urban district in the…

Design of a screening test for identifying reading difficult students in Malayalam and validation thereof among boys is made to help schools proactively intervene with such students. A battery of tests developed based on extant literature on screening tests, reviewed difficulties in reading Malayalam, and discrimination power of the draft tests is…

This investigation tested the importance of early academic achievement for later achievement trajectories among 18,011 students grouped by level of socioeconomic risk. Students considered to be at highest risk were those who experienced homelessness or high residential mobility (HHM). HHM students were compared with students eligible for free…

The study examined the contributions of "orthographic processing" factors to the spelling achievement of typically developing middle-elementary students. The researcher framed orthographic processing as a multilinguistic, multidimensional construct involving process factors related to procedural orthographic operations and product…

This exploratory study investigated how reading comprehension was conceptualized on the new high-stakes test, the 2011-2012 State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR). Specifically, comprehension, rate, and accuracy scores on the Gray Oral Reading Test 4 (GORT-4) from a group of struggling, low-SES, Hispanic middle school students (n…

Implementing effective reading instruction is critical for schools. This study examined the effects of the Corrective Reading (CR) program on junior high students with learning disabilities (LD) and students with learning disabilities and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (LD/ADHD). The research questions were: What differences exist…

This quantitative study analyzed data to find a valid and reliable assessment for progress monitoring also having predictive power of a student's future reading performance on a state-mandated standardized reading achievement evaluation. The Response to Intervention (RTI) model was implemented in the language arts classrooms of a rural middle…