Teaching and learning for emergent bilinguals is often based on monolingual instructional assumptions which ignore how emergent bilinguals use their entire linguistic repertoire to communicate and make meaning. Bilingual pedagogies such as Preview-View-Review have the potential to support the development of biliteracy and meaning-making of…

Wordless picture book reading is one of the common literacy practices for young children that happen at schools and homes. This dissertation of three studies explores the reader-text transactions between young children and wordless picture books in three ways: a content analysis of wordless books potentially featuring characters of color, a…

Throughout history, there have been a variety of circumstances that have forced students to be away from traditional school setting for an extended period. Natural disasters, pandemics, epidemics, or simply summer breaks cause students to spend time away from in person learning that may impact their academic growth momentum. Each time a school…

The students with learning disabilities at a school in the Southeastern United States were not meeting the academic targets on the reading assessment set by the state Department of Education. Moreover, most new standards-based reform initiatives require that students with learning disabilities meet local and state competency requirements.…

When students struggle with reading at the elementary level, their needs are typically met with interventions that focus on word recognition and decoding skills. This same intervention approach is often used to address students who struggle with reading at the middle-school level. The middle school struggling reader accumulates deficits from…

Research suggests that school leaders' understanding and process of making sense of educational reform policies and/or laws is shaped by social, organizational, individual factors. This understanding can impact how a school leader understands and interprets the law/policy and ultimately may impact implementation actions. In 2016, Michigan's Read…

The purpose of this study was to dive into one school district's different learning modality options during the pandemic and analyze their reading growth using the Northwest Evaluation Assessment Measures of Academic Progress (NWEA MAP) as a metric for comparison. The researcher looked at one school district's response to their community's needs…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to examine elementary teachers' understanding of guided reading within a first-year implementation. The researcher conducted a survey and employed both a qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The convergent parallel design of this study allowed for a simultaneous analysis of qualitative and…

Decades of research have established effective curricula for struggling readers. In the digital age, educational technologies expand access to apps and resources to supplement classroom instruction, but most lack scientific backing. "Sound it Out," a collaborative effort between reading researchers and technology developers, aims to…

Research shows that having an excellent reading teacher in the classroom is key to preventing reading difficulties. However, teachers often feel unprepared to work with students experiencing reading difficulties. This can be problematic in a school that uses a multi-tiered system of support for students in which the classroom teacher is…

Collaboration among teachers positively affects both teachers' professional development and students' reading achievement. However, teachers face challenges in collaboration with colleagues. Current research focusing on the collaboration experiences between general education classroom teachers and reading interventionists is absent. The purpose of…

The present study aims to examine the effects of a combination of academic and behavioral supports on students with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD) who are also struggling readers. A multiple baseline across participants single case design was used to measure the impact of an evidence-based systematic phonics program, in combination with…

This study examined the effect of small class size intervention on student outcomes using reading achievement scores as measured by the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), a standardized, norm-referenced test, while controlling for independent variables inclusive of students' gender, race, socioeconomic status (SES), and environment. This…

This study applies Clark and Estes's (2008) gap analysis model to understand how a state education agency's decision making, during reform policy implementation, impacts the success of the initiative. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to assess the effect of the Texas Education Agency's (TEA) decision making, during the policy design and…

Problem behavior, such as non-engagement, impacts academic outcomes (McIntosh et al., 2008; Morgan et al., 2008; Nelson et al., 2003; Roberts et al., 2015). Theories examining the relationship between problem behavior and academics suggest the following regarding the directionality of the relationship: (a) academic challenges lead to problem…