Background: Reading to Dogs (RTD) interventions have become increasingly prevalent in UK primary schools. However, there is a need for research examining teachers' perspectives on RTD, as this could be key in influencing the uptake and adherence to school RTD interventions. Purpose: This study sought to examine primary school teachers' views of…

Literacy levels for children leaving primary school, internationally, remain a cause for concern. There is a limited evidence base for whole school reading programmes and resources in the first two years of primary school compared to studies of interventions for children with reading difficulties. This study used a longitudinal randomised control…

RAND Europe evaluated the implementation of a technology-based intervention that made use of the Microsoft Immersive Reader (IR) in UK classrooms for eight- and nine-year-old pupils. This is the first evaluation of this intervention that uses a randomised control trial (RCT) design, following promising findings related to the use of IR from a…

Many students still leave school without a good grasp of basic literacy, despite the negative implications for future educational and labour market outcomes. We evaluate a programme that involves changing how resources are used within classrooms to reinforce the teaching of literacy. Specifically, the programme involves training teaching…

This paper describes an evaluation of an internet-based reading programme called Accelerated Reader (AR), which is widely used in UK schools and worldwide. AR is a whole-group reading management and monitoring programme that aims to stimulate the habit of independent reading among primary and secondary age pupils. The evaluation involved 349…

Though temporal reasoning is a key factor for text comprehension, existing proposals for visualizing temporal information and temporal connectives proves to be inadequate for children, not only for their levels of abstraction and detail, but also because they rely on pre-existing mental models of time and temporal connectives, while in the case of…

This paper describes the mixed methodology evaluation of the Own-Voice Intensive Phonics (OVIP) programme with 33 secondary students with persistent literacy difficulties. The evaluation involved a quasi-experimental evaluation in which 33 students in years 7-9 in four schools used OVIP over an 8 week period and were monitored at three times for…

Background: Educational interventions are often complex, and their outcomes could be due to factors not focused on in the impact evaluation. Therefore, educational evaluations using a randomised control trial (RCT) design approach need to go beyond obtaining the impact results alone. Purpose: Process evaluation is embedded in the evaluation design…

This study evaluated two 20-week reading interventions for pupils entering secondary school with reading difficulties. The interventions were delivered by trained teaching assistants (three 35-min sessions per week). 287 pupils (ages 11-13) from 27 schools were randomly allocated to three groups: reading intervention (targeting word recognition…

In July 2012 the National Literacy Trust were commissioned by Oxfordshire County Council to deliver the Oxfordshire Reading Campaign, a two-year initiative targeting Oxfordshire primary schools and the wider community, with the aim of substantially improving reading levels at Key Stage 1 and to increase the number of pupils reaching level 2b+.…

Dialogic Reading (DR) is a form of interactive shared book reading which promotes children's active participation in reading. Previous studies have demonstrated that DR positively affects young children's literacy development. This small-scale study extends existing DR research to all-male dyads to examine whether DR has a greater impact on boys'…

In both Ireland and the UK, Traveller children reportedly suffer the lowest rates of educational attainment of any group. This study aimed to promote evidence-based practice in the teaching of reading to Traveller children and thereby to raise their levels of achievement. This involved teachers delivering an evidence-based intervention over a…

We report an empirical comparison of the effectiveness of two theoretically motivated computer-assisted reading interventions (CARI) based on the Finnish GraphoGame CARI: English GraphoGame Rime (GG Rime) and English GraphoGame Phoneme (GG Phoneme). Participants were 6-7-year-old students who had been identified by their teachers as being…

There is now a renewed emphasis in the UK on short intensive interventions to tackle reading failure. In this paper we report on the effect of a programme based on a view that reading problems are associated with the inability of the learner to deal with speech at the level of individual speech sounds even though they may be fully competent in the…

In this article, the author argues that there are so many different understandings and conceptualizations about what dyslexia is, or is not, that the term has become almost meaningless. The questioning of the value of the dyslexia concept turned into media headlines in the UK. The author accounts three key questions surrounding the debate about…