William M. Cruickshank (e.g., Cruickshank 1952, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1985) was a man of strong opinions and a prolific writer. Not only did he contribute to the very beginning of the field of learning disabilities (LD), he strongly advocated for students with LD. He firmly believed that students with learning disabilities needed very competent…

Due to their unique brain profile, children with dyslexia struggle with acquiring basic literacy skills. Even after basic reading skills have been learned students with dyslexia may still struggle greatly with generalizing their skills to new contexts. Researchers have found that 75 percent of children identified with reading problems in third…

In the USA, students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) are among the most vulnerable to have reading difficulties, experience general academic failure, and drop out of school. Students with EBD who receive schooling in residential treatment centers are at even greater risk for academic difficulties. To date, very little research has…

Autonomous motivation has long been linked to reading achievement in older students and recently has received attention for the role it plays in the achievement of younger children. Given America's nearly nationwide adoption of the Common Core State Standards (which emphasize skill acquisition), concern over whether and how reading motivation is…

This report summarizes the results of a cluster-randomized field trial that estimated the effect of "BURST[R]: Reading" on primary grades students' early literacy achievement. BURST is a widely adopted supplemental reading program designed for use with students struggling to acquire early literacy skills and is meant to provide…

Recent Australian data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) indicate that around 14% of children are performing poorly on reading. Comparisons with earlier data show that the relative numbers of Australian children with low reading status have not declined in this century. This is despite a surge of robust research…

Graduate students usually lack sufficient ability to read academic papers effectively and efficiently. For facilitating their reading comprehension, this study adopts summarization as a main reading strategy under the scaffold of keyword evaluation. Furthermore, this study attempts to transform summarization into a group-based educational game by…

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) often have deficient reading skills that require intensive intervention. Effective intervention is comprehensive in nature, addressing individual student needs. This article provides an overview and recommendations for one potential component of individualized support: the use of repeated…

The problem in an elementary school in Southern Texas was poor reading performance on grade level and progress monitoring tests for students with disabilities (SWDs). SWDs may learn to read proficiently when reading instruction is provided using the support facilitation model (SFM) that features a special educator who helps SWDs in literacy or…

The purpose of this true experimental, posttest-only control-group design was to determine if the color coding of exterior letters affects the fluency and decoding ability among fourth grade students who were below grade level in reading. If color coding exterior letters is an effective intervention, then struggling readers could utilize this…

Despite nearly forty years of research on the summer reading loss phenomenon, defined as the backsliding in reading achievement that may occur during the summer when students were not enrolled in school, consensus remains elusive regarding the most effective way to mitigate reading regression. This quantitative, non-experimental research study…

As reading is vital to success in life and opens the door to nearly all other learning opportunities, it is essential that educators understand why students with learning how to read. Therefore, it is key for both professionals and researchers to establish their own approaches to assist those with reading difficulties. "Developing Effective…

Recently, education and literacy researchers have acknowledged educational merit in guided reading that incorporates interactive and authentic reading texts, such as graphic novels, which meet the needs of today's predominantly multimodal learners ( Jennings, Rule, & Zanden, 2014; Kist & Pytash, 2015). This qualitative study explores…

This article offers instructional suggestions and strategies based on research and theoretical literature for developing reading fluency through the use of rhyming poetry and other texts beyond the narrative and informational texts that have been traditionally used for reading instruction. Readers' lack of fluency in reading can be a monumental…

This study used an alternating treatments design to compare the effects of three conditions on the reading fluency, errors, and comprehension of four, sixth-grade students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) who were struggling readers. The conditions were (a) repeated readings in which participants read three times a passage of 100 or…