This study explored the effects of a portable technology intervention, the Nook Simple Touch eReader, on student performance in Reading and English/Language Arts when included as an integral part of the teaching and learning process in an elementary third-grade classroom. This study used the participating students' end-of-year second-grade scores…

With the concurrent emphasis on accountability, prevention, and early intervention, curriculum-based measurement of reading (R-CBM) is playing an increasingly important role in the educational process. This study investigated the differences in diagnostic accuracy and utility between commercial norms and local norms when making high-stakes, local…

Students with disabilities in Grades 3-5 in a Georgia school are not meeting state academic standards. The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to ensure that all students meet these standards; those schools that do not make gains enter into School Improvement status. This study was conducted to determine if staff development that focused on…

An innovative DVD of classic nursery rhymes and stories empowered at-risk kindergarten children to control in the home when and how much they listen, promoting better listening, reading, and overall literacy comprehension skills. Coupled with modest teacher training, and limited use in the classroom, the DVD generated dramatic vocabulary growth in…

The Instructional Conversation (IC) is a complete classroom pedagogy that focuses on teaching through small-group dialogue with students allowing responsive instruction for each student. The IC is anchored by cognitive-developmental theory and by four decades of multi-method quasi-experimental studies. This study describes the first research of an…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a controversial test administration alteration, the read-aloud alteration, in which text (passages and questions) is read aloud to the student on a reading comprehension test. For students whose disabilities impair their skill in decoding text and reading fluently, accessing text to…

The purpose of this correlational study was to determine if variables known upon a group of students' enrollment in kindergarten had a significant relationship with their high-stakes reading assessment results obtained six years later, in the students' fifth grade year. Archival data was gathered from a rural northern Georgia school district.…

Gaps in achievement test scores continue to exist in students depending upon race, gender, income, and ethnicity according to the Center on Education Policy (CEP), an advocate for public schools. School districts and schools are struggling to close the achievement gap that exists. In the 2010-2011 school years, 34.4% of African American students…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)'s emphasis of reading, language arts, and mathematics (RLA&M) and its de-emphasis of science has been a source of great concern among educators. Through an objectivist and constructionist framework, this study explored the unforeseen effects of the NCLB on public science education among Title I (TI) and…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a significant difference in parental involvement in a high performing elementary school and a low performing elementary school based on Epstein's Six Types of Involvement. The extent of parental involvement was identified by using The School and Family Partnership Survey Questionnaire for…