The role of the teacher, specifically teacher craft, is central to engaging students in effective reading instruction. However, the science of reading has revealed that the content taught is also important to reading acquisition. Although the science of reading was aggregated some two decades ago to result in what became known as the five big…

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…

Studies have shown that inferential questions encourage a more in-depth understanding of texts and that students need to learn appropriate strategies for answering them, particularly when they deal with multiple texts. In this experimental study, the authors aimed to improve eighth-grade students' (13- to 14-years old) ability to answer intra- and…

This study examined how teacher and student interactions were influenced by a multistrategy reading model, Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), where students learn to apply before-, during-, and after-reading strategies in small cooperative learning groups. Five middle school English language arts teachers and their students (N = 184)…

The authors examined naturally occurring reading comprehension strategies instruction (RCSI) across four consecutive lessons in 47 Norwegian language arts classrooms at the lower secondary level via video observations (n = 178). Although numerous studies have examined the effectiveness of RCSI for improving reading outcomes, few studies have…

Recent initiatives in the United States and United Kingdom have added greatly to the amount and quality of research on the effectiveness of secondary reading programs, especially programs for struggling readers. In this review of the experimental research on secondary reading programs, the authors focused on 69 studies that used random assignment…

This study explored the extent to which an 18-day history and writing curriculum intervention, taught over the course of one year, helped culturally and academically diverse adolescents achieve important disciplinary literacy learning in history. Teachers used a cognitive apprenticeship form of instruction for the integration of historical reading…

Core reading programs provide the curriculum and guide the instruction for many classroom teachers. The purpose of this study was to conduct a curriculum analysis of comprehension instruction in the five most widely used core reading programs. The recommended comprehension instruction in grades 3, 4, and 5 was examined to answer four questions:…

Reports from research and the larger educational community demonstrate that too many students have limited ability to comprehend texts. The research reported here involved a two-year study in which standardized comprehension instruction for representations of two major approaches was designed and implemented. The effectiveness of the two…

A study investigated the singular and combined effectiveness of phrasing and repeated readings (practice) on the recall of idea units and narrative categories of fifth grade good and poor readers, concluding that practice rather than phrasing proved to have the most facilitating effect on poor readers' recall of idea units but not narrative…

There is little debate among researchers, policymakers, and educational stakeholders that reading achievement among African American students is an important issue (Strickland, 1994). While several scholars have contributed greatly to the research literature on matters pertaining to African American students and reading, additional research is…

Analyzes word recognition instruction in four first-grade classrooms. Finds that: differential instruction may be helpful in first grade; children who enter first grade with low literacy benefit from early and heavy exposure to phonics; and a structured phonics curriculum that includes both onsets and rimes and sounding and blending phonemes…