In this article, we share findings from our process of "reading the past, writing the future" of elementary research in NCTE's journals. Our analysis focused on major domains of the field, including literature, writing, reading, language, and multimodal literacies, and spanned "Elementary English Review", which first appeared in 1924, was renamed…

This study determined what levels of thinking were included in Christian publishers' elementary reading textbooks and if there was a statistically significant difference between the levels of thinking in different textbooks. A proportional random sample of reading comprehension questions was drawn from the fifth grade teacher's editions of reading…

A comparative analysis study, examining the significance in reading achievement between students in the Comprehensive Literacy Program to students in the Traditional Basal Reading Approach was conducted. Implementation of the Comprehensive Literacy Program was an effort to lessen the achievement gap between proficient and low progressing students.…

This descriptive study examined reading specialists in independent, private schools. The context of reading specialists in independent, private schools and their alignment with reading professional's standards was not previously identified. The purposes of this study were to determine how many independent, private schools employed reading…

While the importance of good teaching may be intuitively obvious, only over the past decade has education research begun to quantify the high economic stakes around teacher quality. In a world where the goals of national education systems are being transformed, from a focus on the transmission of facts and memorization to a focus on student…

Although they are valid and reliable, one-minute fluency measures are defining and capturing a reduced view of fluency as simply accuracy and rate in oral reading. Thus, they may lead astray our understanding of struggling readers' reading fluency development and instructional needs. Fluency is a complicated construct. The author discusses a…

In this article, the author describes a project wherein she conducted a qualitative case study of four elementary student teachers from a large, research university in the Rocky Mountain Region, USA. The student teachers were in a traditional teacher education programme in which they took a series of courses followed by 16 weeks of student…

The purpose of this study was to compare the variety, complexity, and frequency of reading behaviors of three groups of first grade students--students who discontinued from Reading Recovery (D-RR), students who did not discontinue from Reading Recovery (ND-RR), and students who never needed Reading Recovery (A-NRR). Students were asked to read…

Get your students motivated! As a teacher, you know how essential student buy-in is to instructional effectiveness: It is not enough to merely have students participate in the classroom activities you select--you need to get them to want to participate. In "Fun-tastic Activities for Differentiating Comprehension Instruction, Grades 2-6", you will…

The reading coaches, professional development programs, and instructional materials that are the cornerstones of the Reading First program and are credited with improving instruction in struggling schools may be threatened by a deep cut included in the 2008 federal budget, officials and observers say. The reduction of more than 60 percent--from…

The "Houghton Mifflin Reading"[c] system is a reading program for instruction in grades K-6. It uses Big Books (authentic literature), anthologies, Read Alouds, and audio compact discs to provide step-by-step instruction in reading. According to the developer's website, "Houghton Mifflin Reading"[c] was developed based on the…

As necessary as reading is to the success of a child--and entire nations--many low-income countries overlook the fundamental duty of their school systems to produce readers. Galvanized by the Education For All (EFA) mission to provide universal access to primary education by 2015, donors and low-income countries have focused on scaling up inputs…

Despite impressive advances in the science of reading intervention, how to best help at-risk readers remains a point of contention. Because reading represents the synthesis of background factors and language and reading skills--all of which develop with age and experience--this meta-analysis investigated whether development (as approximated by…

This study documents the amount and quality of reading instruction provided to second- through fifth-grade students with learning disabilities provided resource-room services. Reading instruction provided by 10 special education resource-room teachers was observed. Findings reveal that teachers and students were on task during instructional time…

Jacob, Bart, and Carl are children with intellectual disabilities (ID; i.e., mental retardation) who experience significant difficulty in learning to read. In the past, most research about reading methods for students with ID focused on teaching students to memorize sight words, a method that is clearly effective. Memorization of sight words is…