Facility with learning from multiple text documents is critical for college and career readiness. However, children with reading difficulties and disabilities have been largely excluded from research on multiple document comprehension. Accordingly, little is known about how children with reading difficulties and disabilities perform on…

Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; n[subscript female] = 264,…

Prior research supports the need for elementary-aged students with reading difficulties (RDs) to receive explicit systematic small-group evidence-based reading instruction. Yet for many students, simply receiving evidence-based reading instruction in a small-group setting is insufficient to reach the progress milestones needed to meet grade-level…

Prior research supports the need for elementary-aged students with reading difficulties (RDs) to receive explicit systematic small-group evidence-based reading instruction. Yet for many students, simply receiving evidence-based reading instruction in a small-group setting is insufficient to reach the progress milestones needed to meet grade-level…

To address the needs of a diverse group of students with reading difficulties, a majority of researchers over the last decade have designed and implemented multicomponent reading interventions (MCRIs) that provide instruction in multiple areas of reading yielding mixed results. The current study evaluates whether students' baseline word reading…

This study investigated the word reading and listening comprehension difficulties of fourth-grade students with significant reading comprehension deficits and the cognitive difficulties that underlie these weaknesses. Latent profile analysis was used to classify a sample of fourth-grade students (n = 446) who scored below the 16th percentile on a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of decoding and reading fluency to reading comprehension and how it differs across different types of comprehension measures among 4th-grade students with reading difficulties and disabilities (M age = 9.8, SD = 0.6). Results indicated that decoding and reading fluency predicted 8.1% to…

This study aimed to describe 1-year changes in students' vocabulary in written narratives. Secondary aims included examination of accuracy and the relationship between lexical diversity and achievement. Participants included 749 students in first through eighth grades. Within-subjects 1-year change in diversity, productivity, and accuracy was…

Reading comprehension tests vary in format and characteristics, which may influence the extent to which component skills are involved in test performance. With students in Grades 6 to 8 with reading difficulties, dominance analyses examined the differential importance of component reading and language skills (word- and text-reading fluency,…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effects of providing mindset intervention in addition to reading intervention compared with only reading intervention for fourth graders with reading difficulties. Reading intervention was provided daily in 45 min sessions throughout the school year. Mindset intervention occurred in small groups…

Automaticity in word recognition has been hypothesized to be important in reading development (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985). However, when predicting educational outcomes, it is difficult to isolate the influence of automatic word recognition from factors such as processing speed or knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences.…

The sentences in texts are far more complex and diverse than those that children commonly encounter in oral language. This raises interesting questions as to whether the understanding of some sentence types might be more important than others in children's reading comprehension. Accordingly, we examined the relation between children's reading…

Attention is correlated with reading, but the extent to which behavioral ratings and sustained attention relate to reading skills is unclear. We assessed 245 fourth and fifth grade struggling readers (mean age = 10.3 years) on behavioral ratings of attention, sustained attention, and reading over a school year. Contributions of behavioral ratings…

Cognitive predictors of reading are well known, but less is understood about the roles of "noncognitive" factors, including emotional variables such as anxiety. While "math" anxiety has been a focus of study, its analogue in the reading literature is understudied. We assessed struggling fourth and fifth graders (n = 272) on…

Although there is evidence that academic registers of English are important for hearing monolingual and multilingual learners as they develop through adolescence, there has been less research in this area with deaf and hard of hearing students. The current study sought to determine whether students who were exposed to American Sign Language (ASL)…