Diane Relf was concerned by what felt like an unbridgeable gulf between Year 7's vocabulary and comprehension, and her aspirations both for their inclusion in history and their later academic success. As a subject leader without the benefit of any history-specific training at the start of her career, she embarked on a journey of intensive reading…

This article discusses use of a multicomponent intervention to develop the reading skill and performance of grades 4 to 8 students identified with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder. Reading intervention targets for this population are vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Reading intervention elements involve explicit vocabulary…

This study set out to design and implement an approach to Tanakh education that would help students become expert decoders of the Biblical Hebrew text as they became expert interpreters of it. The goal, following existing, research-based best instructional practices from literacy, was to create a curriculum in which language skills and meaning…

Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is based on the premise that: (1) students can learn to use the reading strategies that more skillful readers use automatically; (2) students can engage in high-quality discussions about text with peers in heterogeneous student-led groups; and (3) structures and supports can act as a vehicle for equitable…

Continual assessment of student understanding is a crucial aspect of teaching. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) represents raised expectations for the level and depth of mathematical understanding that is expected of our students. But new standards also mean new tests. What those tests will be like is of…

The purpose of this report is to describe the technical qualities of the 2018-2019 operational administration of the English language arts/literacy (ELA/L) and mathematics summative assessments in grades 3 through 8 and high school. The ELA/L assessments focus on reading and comprehending a range of sufficiently complex texts independently and…

The purpose of this report is to describe the technical qualities of the 2018-2019 operational administration of the English language arts/literacy (ELA/L) and mathematics assessments in grades 3 through 8 and high school. New Meridian, in coordination with multiple states and vendors, developed an alternate form of the summative assessment to…

Improving youth science comprehension in the United States is imperative to reverse current trends in student achievement and to meet an expected shortage of scientists in the future. This lag in achievement scores and need for future scientists is a problem. One challenge is to link inquiry-based learning and experiential education with…

Educational measurement is generally thought of as empirical, quantitative, and large-scale, whose purpose is to monitor educational systems. Sociocognitive studies, on the other hand, are associated with small-scale, theoretical, and qualitative studies, the purpose of which is to conduct fine-grained analysis of learning or teaching, or to…

Online professional development (OPD) has potential to improve teacher quality by improving teachers' knowledge and instructional practices. These changes, in turn, have potential to improve student achievement. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of scientific research on the effects of OPD on teachers and, more importantly, on students. This…

The purpose of this article is to provide teachers, tutors and parents with an effective and enjoyable approach to practicing reading fluency, increasing comprehension and encouraging the joy of reading, based on the theories and methods of Sally L. Smith. This method can be applied and adapted to individual student's needs. Sally Smith, the…

English teachers share the blame for the lack of imaginative responses from students to the texts they bring to students, given their penchant for focusing on the most technical elements of literature rather than on its emotional resonance. In classrooms, teachers often concentrate too heavily on what Janet Allen calls the "products" of their…

The key to understanding the development of student misconceptions is to ask students to explain their thinking. Time constraints of classroom teaching make it difficult to consult with each and every individual student about their thought processes. However, when a particular error keeps surfacing, simply marking the response as incorrect will…

Paraphrasing, somewhat different from retelling and summarizing, helps students monitor their understanding and incorporate new knowledge with what they already know about a topic. Paraphrasing helps students realize that comprehension is the goal of reading.

This technical report describes the development of progress monitoring measures in the area of Reading Comprehension. Measures were developed for grades 6 through 8. Twenty alternate forms of each measure were created. Passages were written by graduate students and reviewed by the lead author, as well as teachers and panels of graduate students.…