Nearly 30 years ago, Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin introduced the fourth-grade slump to describe the unexpected deceleration of reading skills between first and fourth grades among children growing up in poverty and low-income households. Advances in our understanding of reading development and how race, racism, or other forms of discrimination are…

A mixed-design study investigated how teachers and second/third- and fourth-grade bilingual students in three high-poverty schools responded to dialogic cognitive strategy instruction or dialogic responsive engagement (RE) instruction compared with a treated control (vocabulary). The second graders were taught in Spanish, and the fourth graders…

This study examined the amount and types of narrative instruction (i.e., story comprehension, oral storytelling, and story writing instruction) that general education English language arts teachers provide to students in grades 1 through 4. The research team conducted 121 approximately 30-minute classroom observations. Educators were asked to…

The authors investigated the differential effect of retention on the development of academic achievement from grades 1 to 5 on children retained in grade 1 over 6 years. Growth mixture model (GMM) analyses supported the existence of two distinct trajectory groups of retained children for both reading and math among 125 ethnically and…

To determine whether formative writing assessments that are directly tied to everyday classroom teaching and learning enhance students' writing performance, we conducted a meta-analysis of true and quasi-experiments conducted with students in grades 1 to 8. We found that feedback to students about writing from adults, peers, self, and computers…

The shared and unique effects of teacher and student reports of teacher-student relationship quality (TSRQ) in second and third grade on academic self-views, behavioral engagement, and achievement the following year were investigated in a sample of 714 academically at-risk students. Teacher and student reports of teacher-student support and…

This longitudinal study investigated children's performance on several informal reading and spelling tasks. Students (n = 274) in a rural North Carolina county were assessed across grades 2 to 6 on the following measures: isolated word recognition (timed and untimed), oral reading accuracy, reading comprehension, reading rate, and spelling.…

This study contributes a novel perspective on grade retention by empirically examining how classroom composition relates to the standardized-testing performance of grade-retained students in their post-retained years. This evaluation employed a sample of entire cohorts of urban elementary school children in the Philadelphia School District over 6…

In this study we examined the contexts and practices of 6 Vermont schools whose students met or exceeded standards set for performance on statewide reading tests administered at second and fourth grade. Demographic data on all elementary schools in Vermont were used in a cluster analysis to identify schools serving low-, middle-, and…