Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to examine the extent to which differences were present by student demographic characteristic in the reading achievement of Texas Grade 3 students. In the first article, the extent to which the economic status (i.e., Poor, Not Poor) of Grade 3 underrepresented boys in Texas is related to…

Of the many narratives to which educators subscribe, one of the most prevalent for the past three decades is the idea that students' success is strongly predicated on their ability to read on grade level by the end of third grade. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of half-day versus full-day kindergarten on students' growth in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of using guided reading instruction to increase overall reading achievement in elementary students over the course of three months. Twenty Kindergarten students with varying reading achievement from a Title I school in Georgia were examined in the study. Students were divided into five groups…

Reading motivation plays an important role in students' reading development. This study examined the effect of grade, gender, and reading ability on students reading motivation. A total of 261 students in grades 5, 8, and 11 from a public school in North central Florida participated in the study. They completed the Motivation to Read Survey…

This study focuses on discovery of what combination of scaffolds will allow 8th grade social studies students to successfully interact with primary source historical documents. The teacher-researcher examined the impact of scaffolding on two obstacles to learning in the discipline of history: (a) the inability of students to navigate successfully…

The purpose of the current research is to assess the clinical utility of an invented spelling tool and determine whether invented spelling and word stress (supra-segmental level measures) can also be used to better identify reading difficulties. The proposed invented spelling tool incorporated linguistic manipulations to alter the difficulty…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex brain based disorder. Children are being diagnosed with ASD at an alarming rate. Students with ASD present with behaviors that interfere with their learning and the learning of others. These behaviors can be a challenge for the teachers and other staff who work with students with ASD. For the past 25…

Adolescent readers require a broad range of reading skills to deal with the challenges of reading complex text. Some researchers argue for a discipline-specific focus to address the low reading proficiency rates among secondary students. Disciplinary literacy attends to the different ways disciplines, such as science, generate and communicate…

People often use different types of available information as cues to make inferences about memory (Koriat, 1997). When these cues are unreliable predictors of memory (like font size), metacognitive illusions can ensue (Mueller, Dunlosky, Tauber, & Rhodes, 2014). Extending upon Rhodes and Castel's (2008) findings that perceptual fluency cues…

The dissertation explored the efficacy of using a POMDP to select and apply appropriate instruction. POMDPs are a tool for planning: selecting a sequence of actions that will lead to an optimal outcome. RTI is an approach to instruction, where teachers craft individual plans for students based on the results of screening test. The goal is to…

Seventy-five percent of third grade students who are at-risk will continue to struggle with reading through the years into adulthood, never to recover their potential reading development. Once less-skilled third grade readers reach ninth grade, one in six students are four times more likely to leave high school before receiving a diploma than…

In this dissertation, I explored the lives of 10 children who were diagnosed with a language disorder. The children were enrolled in a therapeutic half-day speech-language preschool classroom for 3- and 4-year-old children within a public-school system in the rural Southeast. The research included a 15-week mini-ethnographic case study utilizing…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to compare and evaluate two types of vocabulary interventions using grade 9 physics vocabulary terms using two lists of 10 words. A quasi-experimental crossover research design was used to compare the two interventions, presented during two separate sessions, 1) active, multimedia that includes the…

Recent legislation such as No Child Left Behind and the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA) increasingly pressure teachers and schools to be accountable for instructional time in the form of improved test scores. As a result, students are given an increasing variety of assessments in a given school year in an attempt to measure academic…

This quantitative non-experimental study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of Istation, a computer-assisted instruction program, as a form of intervention to improve students' overall reading ability score after use for three consecutive full years (2012-2013, 2013-2014, 2014-2015). Achievement was measured by Istation's Indicators of…