Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) is a mathematics instructional strategy that focuses on students using problem-solving strategies to construct their own understanding. Little research has been conducted to help determine what CGI could look like in other subject areas. The purpose of this study was to investigate ways to apply CGI to a…

A survey of primary schools in England found that girls outperform boys in English across all phases (Ofsted in Moving English forward. Ofsted, Manchester, 2012). The gender gap remains an on-going issue in England, especially for reading attainment. This paper presents evidence of gender differences in learning to read that emerged during the…

China has launched a nation-wide project of learning English as a "core" subject starting from the third grade in primary schools after the Ministry of Education (MOE) issued "National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education" at the beginning of this century. However, EFL teachers are far from sufficient in rural…

This study investigates the impact of using an adaptive computer-assisted instruction (CAI) program in early childhood education. The Waterford Early Reading Program (ERP) is a CAI program that was assigned to kindergarten and first grade students in a school district in Texas for the 2015-2016 school year. The Texas Primary Reading Inventory…

The current research study investigated the effects of talking story books on Saudi young EFL learners' reading comprehension skills. A sample of Saudi-young-EFL learners were randomly selected and divided into two groups: an experimental group (40 students) and a control group (39 students). Students of both groups took a pre reading…

The growing number of students whose primary language does not match the language of their schools and a steadily growing performance gap has prompted widespread attention to support emergent literacy gains for those students. This study randomly assigned schools in a Southwestern U.S. state with English language learners (ELLs) in kindergarten…

Much is known about short-term--but very little about the long-term--effects of reading interventions. To rectify this, a detailed analysis of follow-up effects as a function of intervention, sample, and methodological variables was conducted. A total of 71 intervention-control groups were selected (N = 8,161 at posttest) from studies reporting…

This pilot project investigated the effects of ABRACADABRA (ABRA), a web-based literacy program developed by the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) at Concordia University, on primary school children in Hong Kong. A total of 125 Primary 2 students participated in a 14-week long study. Five classes were randomly assigned to…

This study examined the effectiveness of a multisensory phonics-based reading remediation program for adolescent delinquents classified as poor readers living at a residential treatment center. We used a pretest--posttest control group design with random assignment. The treatment group participated in a 30-hr multisensory phonics reading…

The importance of reading skills to academic achievement, job acquisition and future success is well documented. Most of the research on reading interventions focuses on children in primary schools but many children start secondary school with very poor reading skills and schools require evidence-based interventions to support these children. The…

This paper describes a randomised controlled trial conducted with 10 secondary schools in England to evaluate the impact and feasibility of Fresh Start as an intervention to help new entrants with low prior literacy. Fresh Start is a synthetic phonics programme for small groups of pupils, here implemented three times per week over 22 weeks. The…

The ability to flexibly approach the pronunciation of unknown words, or set "for variability", has been shown to contribute to word recognition skills. However, this is the first study that has attempted to teach students strategies for increasing their set for variability. Beginning readers (N = 15) were instructed to correct oral…

The present study evaluated the efficacy of a new preschool early literacy intervention created specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children with functional hearing. Teachers implemented "Foundations for Literacy" with 25 DHH children in 2 schools (intervention group). One school used only spoken language, and the other used…

This article compares the existing single-strategy approach towards the teaching of early literacy in schools in rural Cambodia with a multiple-strategy approach introduced as part of a reading intervention programme. Classroom observations, questionnaires and in-depth interviews with teachers were used to explore teachers' practices and…

This paper reports the follow-up of a randomised control trial study of the ABRACADABRA web-based literacy intervention that contrasted synthetic versus analytic phonics (Comaskey, Savage & Abrami, 2009) in kindergarten children from urban low-SES backgrounds. Participants who received a "synthetic" phonics+phoneme awareness training (n = 26) or…