"Spelling Mastery" is designed to explicitly teach spelling skills to students in grades 1 through 6. One of several Direct Instruction curricula from McGraw-Hill that precisely specify how to teach incremental content, "Spelling Mastery" includes phonemic, morphemic, and whole-word strategies. The What Works Clearinghouse…

This report explains that The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)--known since 2001 as No Child Left Behind (NCLB)--requires states to set annual objectives for increasing student achievement in reading and mathematics and closing achievement gaps among student subgroups. Under the flexibility waiver granted by the US Department of…

This paper reports on an analysis of large-scale assessments of Grades 5-8 students' writing across 10 provinces and 2 territories in Canada. Theory, classroom practice, and the contributions and constraints of large-scale writing assessment are brought together with a focus on Grades 5-8 writing in order to provide both a broad view of…

The present study examined teacher attitudes toward dyslexia and the effects of these attitudes on teacher expectations and the academic achievement of students with dyslexia compared to students without learning disabilities. The attitudes of 30 regular education teachers toward dyslexia were determined using both an implicit measure and an…

Students in grades 5 and 8 completed a state writing assessment, and their first and final drafts on the extended writing portion of the test were copied and scored using the state writing rubric. The rubric consisted of three primary traits: Content and Organization, Style and Fluency, and Language Use. Scorers were blind to the study purpose and…

Students in Grades 5 and 8 completed a 30-minute writing performance assessment and a writing performance assessment completed over 3 days. Assessments were evaluated on four traits (ideas, organization, conventions, and sentence fluency). A significant interaction was found at Grade 5 between length of time allotted for the assessment and…

In the present study, 49 fifth-graders enrolled the KIPP D.I.A.M.O.N.D. Academy in the 2002-03 school year were individually matched to control student from five feeder schools on the basis of ethnicity, free-reduced lunch status, and fourth-grade achievement on the Reading and Mathematics subtests of the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment…