Educators often provide students with disabilities reading accommodations to help them access content during instruction, but research has shown that not all students benefit from those accommodations. Given the importance of content area instruction, there is a need for further research on how to efficiently identify reading accommodations that…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to examine the extent to which text condition influences reading comprehension of life science text for 72 4th grade students and to understand their meaning making of each text condition. A three-paragraph passage on the circulatory system was presented in three different diagram types/conditions. All…

Several national and international studies have indicated that there is an achievement gap between student literary reading and student informational reading, with the gap favoring literary reading. One plausible explanation for this gap is that reading informational text has been neglected in early grades in the U.S. (Dreher, 2003; Kletzien &…

This mixed methods study explored implementing guided reading in grades 3-5 in a suburban school district located in Southeastern Pennsylvania. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how teachers implement guided reading in their classrooms and how the use of guided reading affects student achievement in Text Structure and Vocabulary, Reading…

This study examined (a) the effects of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) on student use of critical thinking skills (CTS) in written responses to district reading assessments, (b) if practiced oral responses affected the ability to respond critically using written language, (c) whether there was a relationship between the development of the CTS of…