There is a wide gap between what research evidence identifies as effective reading intervention and what is currently offered in schools. This effectiveness study reports the results of a long-term research/school system partnership that is implementing reading intervention for children with reading difficulties in Canadian community schools. In…

The study tested whether cognitive retroactive transfer (CRT) of language skills from English to Hebrew takes place; specifically, whether an improvement in linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in English as a foreign language (FL) would lead to an improvement in these skills in Hebrew as the first language (L1). The participants consisted of 124…

Text-to-speech and related read-aloud tools are being widely implemented in an attempt to assist students' reading comprehension skills. Read-aloud software, including text-to-speech, is used to translate written text into spoken text, enabling one to listen to written text while reading along. It is not clear how effective text-to-speech is at…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a multilinguistic intervention to improve reading and spelling in primary grade students who struggle with literacy. Twenty second-grade students with spelling deficits were randomly assigned to receive a multilinguistic intervention with a phonological and orthographic awareness…

A 2-year, randomized control trial with 9th to 10th grade students with significant reading problems was provided for 50 minutes a day in small groups. Comparison students were provided an elective class and treatment students the reading intervention. Students were identified as demonstrating reading difficulties through failure on their state…

In this study, 123 children with a diagnosis of developmental dyslexia were assigned to different treatment groups, either variations of Bakker's intervention program based on the balance model or a control, a specific reading training group. Thorough cognitive and neuropsychological assessment allowed determination of the subtype of dyslexia…

The authors summarize evidence from a multiyear study with secondary students with reading difficulties on (a) the potential efficacy of primary-level (Tier 1), secondary-level (Tier 2), and tertiary-level (Tier 3) interventions in remediating reading difficulties with middle school students, (b) the likelihood of resolving reading disabilities…

Teacher knowledge and instructional expertise have been found in correlational and pre- and post-test studies to be related to student reading achievement. This article summarizes data presented in this special issue and additional research to address four questions: (a) What do expert reading teachers know? (b) Why do teachers need to acquire…

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of a method to improve reading fluency in children with dyslexia. The method, which we named "subsyllabic," was aimed at automatizing the recognition of syllables within words in connected texts, presented by ad hoc software. Two versions of this method--one self-paced and the other one with…

Forty-six dyslexic boys (aged eight to 13) were administered Piracetam or placebo in a double-blind, parallel experiment. Although, overall, there were no significant group effects, the within-subject design revealed improvements in reading speed and accuracy in Piracetam Ss. Dyslexics with higher reading ages improved significantly compared to…

After a year of participation in an intermediary setting, the "Learning Laboratory," analyses of pre- and post-academic measures indicated that sixth- to eighth-grade learning disabled students demonstrated significant reading gains when compared with control students; ninth- to twelfth-grade learning disabled students did not demonstrate academic…

The longitudinal study of 70 children with reading disabilities (followed over four years) and 35 reading disabled children (followed for eight-point-six years) found that rate of improvement in reading and spatial reasoning in disabled and normal children was similar but that reading disability tended to persist into young adulthood. (DB)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an early intervention program based on the Reading Recovery (RR) format could be developed for pairs of struggling readers that would allow them to make accelerated progress similar to that experienced in the 1-to-1 RR tutorial. A preliminary pilot study showed that the RR lesson format could be…

Forty children with dyslexia were treated with visual hemisphere-specific stimulation based on their subtype of dyslexia. Children with L-type dyslexia (hurried, inaccurate reading) who received treatment with anxiety-laden words made fewer substantive errors and more fragmentations on a text-reading task, compared to children who received…

Twenty-eight L-dyslexic and 26 P-dyslexic children (mean age of 9-10) received hemisphere-specific stimulation (HSS) by presentation of words to right and left fingers, respectively. Relative to controls, HSS-treated L-dyslexic subjects showed larger improvement of accuracy in text reading, whereas HSS-treated P-dyslexic subjects showed more…