Informational reading instruction plays an important role in early literacy but has traditionally received less emphasis than literary text in elementary classrooms. This mixed-methods study illuminates trends from observed reading instruction of 77 first-year elementary teachers, drawing on data from 761 lesson segments scored with the Protocol…

Dual-route theory, which emphasizes the importance of lexical and nonlexical routes, makes specific predictions about the kinds of strategies that young students might adopt when attempting to correctly read and spell regular and irregular words. The current study tests these predictions by assessing strategy choice on regular, irregular, and…

In this study, we used Reading Recovery as the context to examine the relationship between three types of contingent teaching (temporal, instructional, and domain contingency) and student outcomes in a one-to-one literacy tutoring setting. We first created a National Teacher Effectiveness Index for all Reading Recovery teachers in the country and…

In this commentary, the author identifies what, in her opinion, has been left out of the discussion of "scale up." She expresses particular concern that the rhetoric of scaling up, and the concomitant assertion of scientific underpinnings for programs brought to scale, may overstate the relation of the developers' programs and program materials to…

Supports predictions concerning two consequences of combining merit pay and other business practices within a reading program: (1) that school personnel would constrict their definitions of reading and reading instruction to those prescribed by district policy and that (2) teachers would consider reading instruction less fulfilling than they did…