Teacher professional learning is often disjointed and not aligned with the curricula teachers use in daily instruction. This lack of preparation has led to fragmented approaches to teaching young students to read, in part because initiatives lose momentum, teachers modify the instruction beyond recognition, and programs are soon eclipsed by newer…

This study describes the development of a special education teacher observation protocol detailing the elements of effective decoding instruction. The psychometric properties of the protocol were investigated through many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM). Video observations of classroom decoding instruction from 20 special education teachers across…

With Response to Intervention (RTI) increasingly used for identification for special education services, interventions are systematically being implemented and evaluated to improve achievement for students with disabilities. This descriptive study provides baseline data on RTI interventions and tiered instruction from 15 school districts (5 large,…

Our nation's educational system has scored many extraordinary successes in raising the level of reading and writing skills in younger children. Yet the pace of literacy improvement in our schools has not kept up with the accelerating demands of the global knowledge economy. In state after state, the testing data mandated by No Child Left Behind…

The disparity between the results of state accountability tests in reading and the fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has left many educators dismayed and concerned. In this article the authors describe a comparison of assessment approaches evident in NAEP to the approaches taken in a sample of state tests. The authors…