This article begins with vignettes that demonstrate how talent potential can (and does) manifest differently in different children. While some children display talent in one or more academic fields, other children demonstrate creative, intellectual, or artistic aptitudes. Regardless of their field or domain of talent, all children can benefit from…

Educational practices that prove effective often involve a substantial investment of training and support time. Unfortunately, that is the very characteristic that makes it difficult and costly to expand the programs on a large scale. A key challenge when scaling up is to maintain high levels of effectiveness at an affordable cost.…

The Louisiana English language arts student standards were created by over one hundred Louisiana educators with input by thousands of parents and teachers from across the state. Educators envisioned what proficient students should know and be able to do to compete in our society and focused their efforts on creating standards that would allow them…

Middle grade students with disabilities that impact reading, including learning disabilities (LD) in reading, high functioning autism (ASD), and emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), and students atrisk for reading failure due to the effects of poverty often struggle to make knowledge-based inferences while reading informational texts. As a…

Barriers to literacy complicate collaboration between English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, content teachers, and teachers of students who are visually impaired (i.e., those who are blind or have low vision). Each teacher brings knowledge of practice in their field to the table, but where the overlap occurs for students with visual…

This brief, co-produced by the National Center on Deaf-Blindness (NCDB) and Accessible Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Systems (ATLAS), provides important information about the differences between students with significant cognitive disabilities who have cortical visual impairment (CVI) and those who have other types of visual impairment (VI).…

This article describes two assessment tools that have been used to assess the reading skills of youth participating in alternative basic skills and livelihood skills training programs. The Rapid Assessment of Reading Skills (RARS) was developed to identify potential participants who needed to improve their reading skills before beginning training…

Purpose: Reading involves the ability to decode and draw meaning from printed text. Reading skill profiles vary widely among learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One fairly common pattern is relative strength in decoding combined with weak comprehension skills--indicators of this profile emerge as early as the preschool years. In order…

To assess education progress in the early grades and identify achievement gaps, this study examined reading achievement data for kindergarten and grade 1 students in two districts in Illinois: District U-46 (Elgin Area Schools) and District 186 (Springfield Public Schools). Drawing on a different reading assessment in each district, the study team…

Purpose: Reading involves the ability to decode and draw meaning from printed text. Reading skill profiles vary widely among learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One fairly common pattern is relative strength in decoding combined with weak comprehension skills--indicators of this profile emerge as early as the preschool years. In order…

There is value in being a lifelong reader and writer; yet, preservice teachers frequently do not exhibit these attributes. As an educator of future teachers, the author of this article reflects on practice. One goal in working with these education students is to develop their competencies in the use of literary strategies, with a secondary goal of…

Research documents the benefits of reading aloud to children and suggests that the more children are engaged during the read aloud experience the greater the benefit to their language and reading development. Children's engagement during a read aloud can be increased by creating anticipation regarding the story, making predictions about what will…

Digitalization produces increasingly multimodal and interactive literary forms. A major challenge for foreign language education in adopting such forms lies in deconstructing discursive borders between literary education and digital education (romance of the book vs. euphoric media heavens), thereby crossing over into a perspective in which…

Students living in poverty struggle to achieve academic success and pursue careers that require post-secondary training. Students coming from families with low socio-economic status enter kindergarten with lower literacy levels than their peers. Educators can initiate a change by increasing opportunities for students to build strong literacy…

Learning to read English is more difficult than in most other alphabetic languages. It sometimes seems there are not reliable rules for linking letters with sounds. Teaching students all of the letter patterns they may find in texts is no simple task. Students struggle processing the sounds in words, so even words with simple spellings are…