This article contributes to understanding the effectiveness of early grade reading interventions in low-income-country contexts and how and why such interventions vary in their effectiveness across schools. It presents the results from an impact evaluation of an early grade reading intervention in Haiti with a mixed-methods analysis of factors…

Creating an environment suitable for language acquisition through shared reading significantly contributes to improving a child's language development and parent-child relationship. Reading in an interactive way, such as dialogic reading, is favorable. Nevertheless, dialogic reading is designed for children above the age of two and shared reading…

The increased use of smartphones and tablets sets the stage for new mobile-based educational programs that seek to increase student learning and engagement in school and at home. This study examines the effectiveness of Escribo Play, a game-enhanced educational program, on preschool students' phonological awareness, word reading, and writing…

Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have made progress in increasing primary school enrollment and completion among the very poor. However, challenges in improving reading persist. This study contributes to the evidence base on what works to improve early-grade reading skills by evaluating an early reading program implemented in two…

The current article examines what factors explained the success of a reading program delivered by older adult volunteers to at-risk early readers. The article also examines the direction of the relationship over time (both direct and mediated) between reading achievement, frequency of reading at home, and academic self-beliefs. Two hundred and…

This report describes a cluster randomized control trial (RCT) intervention study of the effectiveness of the ABRACADABRA (ABRA) Web-based literacy system using a classroom-level RCT intervention with 1,067 children in 74 kindergarten and Grade 1 or Grade 1/2 classrooms across Canada. The authors closely followed the CONSORT criteria for executing…

This paper is an author-edited transcript of a presentation to the ALIA Public Libraries Summit, Canberra, July 2009. The author starts off by talking about what people know about children, early reading and a literate Australia. He then discusses three main reasons why public libraries have had success in children's literacy and related programs,…

This article reports some of the findings of a study involving 11 New Zealand 4-year-old precocious readers (Margrain, 2005). The children, aged between 4:01 and 4:10, had reading ages three to nine years above their chronological age. Assessment of precocious reading abilities is discussed, including how assessment findings are influenced by the…

"Sound Foundations," a literacy curriculum designed to teach phonological awareness to preliterate children, focuses exclusively on phoneme identity (that is, different words can start and end with the same sound). It works from the principle that phonemic awareness is necessary but not sufficient to reading, which depends on the…

Apart from the annual returns to the Ministry of Education of Reading Recovery (RR) data (and to a lesser extent, the four-yearly National Education Monitoring Project cycle data), there is currently no national data sets of reading achievement information for New Zealand primary school children. This article uses the national RR data for 2002 as…