Identifying and supporting students in early elementary grades with low literacy achievement is critical to help them achieve grade-level proficiency and stay on track academically. "Reading Recovery"® is an intervention that provides one-on-one tutoring to students in grade 1 with low literacy achievement. This supplemental program aims…

Identifying and supporting students in early elementary grades with low literacy achievement is critical to help them achieve grade-level proficiency and stay on track academically. "Reading Recovery"® is an intervention that provides one-on-one tutoring to students in grade 1 with low literacy achievement. This supplemental program aims…

Sounds-Write is a systematic synthetic phonics approach that has been successfully used to teach students to read and spell for the last two decades. This volume brings together twelve case studies -- written by practitioners -- of implementation of the Sounds-Write programme in different settings and geographical contexts (Europe, US, Australia).…

One of the greatest challenges of an elementary school teacher is equipping students with comprehension strategies that transfer to all content areas. With stable levels of reading achievement over the last two decades in the United States, it is necessary that further research be conducted on methods of increasing students' comprehension…

Reading words and developing larger vocabularies are critical parts of reading proficiency, but these checkpoints do not have significance until young students grasp the meaning behind words. While teachers and the school culture can improve early reading proficiency, legislatures and state education agencies can support such efforts by…

This study compared children's Spanish reading performance across 2 reading intervention conditions: small group versus individual (teacher-student). Six second-grade Costa Rican students with low Spanish reading ability participated in the study. An alternating-treatments design was used to compare the relative effectiveness of the 2…

Although reading fluency is one of the five essential early-reading skills students must develop, many elementary-aged students in the United States do not read age-appropriate material fluently. As such, small-group interventions are practical and often more time efficient than individualized interventions aimed to address this problem. However,…

This article reviews research on the achievement outcomes of alternative approaches for struggling readers ages 5-10 (US grades K-5): One-to-one tutoring, small-group tutorials, classroom instructional process approaches, and computer-assisted instruction. Study inclusion criteria included use of randomized or well-matched control groups, study…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of the most widely used literacy instructional approaches on the reading comprehension of Grade 2-6 students. Participants (N = 660) were enrolled in 4 districts in the United States; 53% were male (n = 348) and 47% were female (n = 312); 51% were Caucasian (n = 338), 23% were African American…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Education Secretary Outlines Obama Education Agenda: In Appearance Before House Committee, Duncan Stresses Reform…

Over the past decade, Americans have become increasingly concerned about the high numbers--and costs--of high school dropouts. The time is now to build a similar consensus around this less-recognized but equally urgent fact: The pool from which employers, colleges, and the military draw is too small, and still shrinking, because millions of…

In this study we investigated reading development from kindergarten to third grade for 1,913 economically disadvantaged children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. Characteristics of the child, the family, classroom instruction, and school composition were used to model influences from multiple levels of children's…