Purpose: Explore how different automated scoring (AS) models score reliably the expressive language and vocabulary knowledge in depth of young second grade Latino English learners. Design/methodology/approach: Analyze a total of 13,471 English utterances from 217 Latino English learners with random forest, end-to-end memory networks, long…

More than half of North Carolina's grade 3 students struggle with reading. The percentage of students scoring below proficient in reading at the end of grade 3 was 55 percent in 2017/18. That percentage has remained largely unchanged, at above 50 percent, since 2013/14, when North Carolina passed its K-3 Read to Achieve literacy act. Read to…

Reading aloud to students in preschool and the early grades is ubiquitous in American classrooms and considerable research has been conducted on read aloud practices (Karweit & Wasik, 1996; Morrow & Brittain, 2003; Van Kleeck, Stahl, & Bauer, 2003; Varelas & Pappas, 2006; Wilkinson & Silliman, 2000). Compelling evidence…

Teachers balance many goals when selecting texts for small-group reading. The author explored the impact of one variable that teachers consider, quantitative text difficulty, on students' participation, discussion, comprehension, and fluency in small-group discussions of informational science texts. Six bilingual third graders identified as…

Continuous professional development is a process that requires constant and active learning for a teacher throughout his/her professional life. In this process, teachers are expected to perform activities aiming at increasing both their professional development and the quality of teaching within the classroom. One of these is lesson study. This…

Interactive app books are increasingly part of young children's literacy ecosystem. However, most previous studies examined buddy reading with traditional print books or CD-ROM books. Little is known about whether and how buddy reading with app books might be related to subsequent individual reading. To address this, informed by multimodal…

This study explores the effects of a Spanish vocabulary intervention on the literacy outcomes of students at risk for vocabulary difficulties in Chile. We screened 2nd-grade students (N = 84) with a standardized Spanish vocabulary measure. We then randomly assigned students who scored below the 40th percentile (n = 30) to an intervention or…

The present study examined the reading comprehension and receptive vocabulary skills of children with poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding using a regression-based matching technique. Participants included five cohorts of children who were identified as typical readers (N = 70,493 - 75,553) or as children with specific reading…

Models are central to the practice and teaching of science. Yet people often fail to grasp how scientific models explain their observations of the world. Realizing the explanatory power of a model may require aligning its relational structure to that of the observable phenomena. The present research tested whether "relational…

This paper introduces a new observation system that is designed to investigate students' and teachers' talk during literacy instruction, "Creating Opportunities to Learn from Text" (COLT). Using video-recorded observations of 2nd-3rd grade literacy instruction (N=51 classrooms, 337 students, 151 observations), we found that nine types of…

Traditional measures of reading ability designed for younger students typically focus on componential skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary), and the items are often presented in a discrete and decontextualized format. The current study was designed to explore whether it was feasible to develop a more integrated, scenario-based assessment of…

Emerging evidence suggests that children's sensitivity to suprasegmental phonology such as stress and timing (i.e., prosodic sensitivity) contributes to reading. The primary goal of this study was to investigate pathways of the relation of prosodic sensitivity to reading (word reading and reading comprehension) using data from 370 first-grade…

Traditional measures of reading ability designed for younger students typically focus on componential skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary) and the items are often presented in a discrete and decontextualized format. The current study was designed to explore whether it was feasible to develop a more integrated, scenario-based assessment of…

Previous research suggests that activating background knowledge immediately prior to read-alouds in Kindergarten is an important strategy for improving children's learning (e.g. Cervetti & Hiebert, 2015). But, because children's background knowledge varies considerably at the individual level, teachers are also often providing relevant…

Measures of decoding and oral language have been shown to predict early reading comprehension across a wide variety of languages, though the timeframe and strength of the predictions vary by orthographic depth. This study is the first to examine predictors of early reading in Vietnamese, a transparent orthography of Romanized letters and…