The strong association of early language skills to later reading ability suggests that supporting the development of these skills in children who enter preschool or kindergarten with below-average language abilities may lead to stronger reading skills. Despite this, few evidence-based supplemental language instructional programs exist for…

Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) is a text- and discourse-based set of instructional practices that engage students with disciplinary texts as a means of building content knowledge and improving reading comprehension. PACT)s "efficacy" has been the subject of extensive previous trials. The purpose of this study was to…

Research has established that reading and writing skills are closely linked for most individuals, which can be explained by the shared knowledge and functional relations theoretical perspectives. The current study used quantile regression to explore differences between and within Grades 3-5 in the United States in the associations between a…

Background: Failure to learn early reading skills leads to lower reading comprehension later in elementary school (Double et al., 2019; Paige et al., 2019), which can then lead to poverty, underemployment, and increased likelihood of being incarcerated (World Literacy Foundation, 2018). Early reading skills are best developed in kindergarten…

Teachers in Florida are tasked with the insurmountable job of teaching the curriculum, supporting their students socially and emotionally, and differentiating instruction and assessments for all students in inclusion classrooms. In Florida, students labeled as English language learners (ELLs) with varying English language proficiency are placed in…

This study examined the heterogeneity of literacy profiles for adolescents with and without a specific learning disability (SLD) in the U.S. state of Florida Student subgroups displaying common patterns of performance in word-level skills and reading comprehension were identified through latent profile analysis. Results indicate most of the total…

Over 60 years of conflicting messaging about the usefulness and impact of grammar on writing has guided instructional practice in K-12 classrooms across the country. In Florida, like many other states, reading scores have continued to decline despite multiple efforts to identify the root causes of learning deficiencies. Even though research…

Within the secondary level of education covering students in grades 6-12, reading comprehension continues to be an area of concern for traditional public-school educators. Because students lack the foundations of reading upon entering middle and high school, on average across the United States, many students struggle to meet high school graduation…

Confirmatory factor analyses of data from 1,501 kindergarten to 5th-grade children who completed 3 measures of decoding, 3 measures of reading comprehension, and 3 measures of listening comprehension as part of a larger study were used to identify the dimensionality of reading skills across elementary school. A 1-factor (reading) model was the…

Fewer than half of all students across the nation qualify as proficient readers. Compounding this problem are the underlying challenges to students and their teachers of learning disabilities and dyslexia. Professional development courses can help teachers address these deficiencies. The purpose of this study was to determine how graduates of the…

The purpose of this study was to test the directionality of influence between reading comprehension (RC) and print exposure (PE), thereby estimating genetic and environmental effects of this relation. The sample consisted of 910 twins in fourth through ninth grades (M[subscript age] = 12.33 years, SD = 1.41) from the Florida Twin Project on…

District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to test the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons taught 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The…

The assessment of screening accuracy and setting of cut points for a universal screener have traditionally been evaluated using logistic regression analysis. This analytic technique has been frequently used to evaluate the trade-offs in correct classification with misidentification of individuals who are at risk of performing poorly on a later…

Prior knowledge activation is a crucial component of reading comprehension. Previous studies have examined students' prompted (or solicited) purposeful knowledge activation, which occurs when the explicit goal is to activate knowledge, as well as ancillary knowledge activation, which is when students indirectly use their prior knowledge to fill in…

The simple view of reading (SVR) proposes that performance in reading comprehension is the result of decoding and linguistic comprehension, and that each component is necessary but not sufficient for reading comprehension. In this study, the joint and unique predictive influences of decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading comprehension…