As they are naturally curious about the world around them, young children ask lots and lots of questions. In classrooms today, however, there seems to be little space for these student-generated questions as teachers are more likely to pose the questions. Research indicates that question generation is an effective strategy to motivate young…

This randomized controlled trial in 55 low-performing schools across Florida implemented two literacy interventions--one using a standalone intervention and one using materials embedded in the core reading program. The interventions were delivered daily for 45 minutes for 27 weeks in 2013/14 and 2014/15 in small groups of K-2 students at risk of…

"Data-driven school reform" emphasizes the idea that if teachers analyze the kinds of questions students miss on standardized reading comprehension tests, and then give students lots of practice with such items, they will end up with higher test scores. This approach is likely to be popular with the new Partnership for Assessment of…

Effective teachers are continuously striving to improve their instruction. Reading Recovery teachers have detailed and specific literacy training and expertise that can be of great value to classroom teachers, especially in the area of guided reading instruction. This article explores the ways in which key Reading Recovery strategies can be…

When leaders in Lewisville Independent School District in Texas saw the district's writing scores on STAAR--the Texas standardized tests introduced in 2011--they panicked. They were not alone. The response from many neighboring districts, and from some of Lewisville's own campuses, was a renewed commitment to summer and after-school drill-and-kill…

Struggling readers often lack fluency and motivation and many exhibit dyslexic characteristics. Often these children sit undiagnosed in regular education classroom with interventions that are limited in scope and fail to have the motivational element which will encourage these struggling readers to actively engage in reading and writing. Students…

Mueller and Hanson report on a continuous improvement process taking place in the Papillion-La Vista School District in Papillion, Nebraska, where a proactive stance to improved learning for all students focuses directly on the human element as the change agent. The district has implemented a systemic and systematic continuous improvement process…

In the past 2 decades, researchers (often working closely with parents, teachers, and other school staff members) have conducted studies that have substantially increased understanding how to effectively teach children and adolescents with intellectual disability (ID) to read. This research focus has been fueled by increased societal expectations…

This article describes the experiences of some of the many families of the deaf and hard of hearing children who come to Shared Reading Saturdays at Northern Essex Community College (NECC) in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The program, which includes monthly gatherings and is coordinated by the NECC's Gallaudet University Regional Center, features deaf…

This paper describes the structure and activities of READ (Reading Effectively Across the Disciplines), a pilot initiative to improve students' critical reading skills, disciplinary literacy and academic success. READ employs a multimodal design that consists of faculty training in disciplinary literacy instruction and curricular enhancement,…

Today an increasing number of teachers have successfully implemented blogging with students ranging from kindergarten through high school (Hungerford-Kresser, Wiggins, & Amaro-Jimenez, 2012). Although research on blogging is scant, existing studies suggest it can benefit students in various ways (Meinecke, Smith, & Lehmann-Willenbrock,…

This column explains three ways that teachers can improve reading test performance. Basically, the idea is that instead of teaching students to respond to particular question types as is typical of test preparation despite the ineffectiveness of this practice, it is better to teach students to read the test passages more effectively. Three…

The teaching approach described in this article was originally designed for kindergarten students who are at risk for reading disorders. In a 30-minute session, students practiced attending to and identifying the spelling patterns, pronunciations, and meanings of common morphological suffixes through listening activities, interactive book reading,…

Direct vocabulary instruction of Tier 2 and Tier 3 words in intermediate-grade curricula is an important tool of literacy instruction because English is a language grafted from many roots and has not developed a one-to-one phoneme-grapheme correspondence. In addition to knowing graphemes and phonemes, students must formally learn words that cross…

This article is designed to help teachers interpret reading assessment data from DIBELS beyond individual subtests to better support their students' needs. While it is important to understand the individual subtest measures, it is more vital to understand how each fits into the larger picture of reading development. The underlying construct of…