The purpose of this quantitative, comparative study was to examine if and to what extent, there are statistically significant differences in decoding and oral reading fluency scores between at-risk Title I students who receive multisensory phonics-based instruction in first grade and those who do not in the Western United States. Paivio's dual…

The transition from sounding out unfamiliar words to effortlessly reading connected text does not occur all at once nor at the same rate for students. The purpose of this study was to explore the accuracy of three decision rules (data point, median, and trend line) applied to progress monitoring outcomes of alphabetic principle (nonsense word…

The transition from sounding out unfamiliar words to effortlessly reading connected text does not occur all at once or at the same rate for students. The purpose of this study was to explore the accuracy of three decision rules (data point, median, and trend line) applied to progress monitoring outcomes of alphabetic principle (nonsense word…

Over the past decade, parent advocacy groups led a grassroots movement resulting in most states adopting dyslexia-specific legislation, with many states mandating the use of the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction. Orton-Gillingham is a direct, explicit, multisensory, structured, sequential, diagnostic, and prescriptive approach to…

Professional development in research-based early reading intervention and curriculum materials is not consistently available to special educators working with students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). This article provides practitioners serving elementary school students with and at risk for EBD with a variety of options for…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a supplemental reading program that emphasizes phoneme awareness and phonics with small groups composed of both at-risk native English-speakers and at-risk English language learners (ELLs) whose first language is not Spanish. A multiple-baseline-across-participants design was utilized to investigate the…

Students who display reading difficulties/disabilities at the end of third grade are less likely to succeed in content areas and graduate from high school than their reading-proficient peers. Literature suggests that students in rural school districts lag behind their suburban peers in terms of their reading levels and accessibility to resources.…

Within brief experimental analysis, assessment data are used to target interventions for struggling students. This use of assessment data aligns with prevention and early intervention frameworks, but popular measures are limited for this purpose because of issues with measuring improvement in short periods. Our study was a pilot comparison of two…

In this study we examined the effectiveness of a reading intervention targeting a group of 24 struggling readers in ten primary schools in Ireland. The intervention consisted of two components; component one consisted of 15-20 minutes delivery of the Toe-by-Toe programme (a well established systematic synthetic phonics programme) and the second…

Many students who struggle to obtain the alphabetic principle are at risk for being identified as having a reading disability and would benefit from additional explicit phonics instruction as a remedial measure. In this action research case study, the research team conducted two experiments to investigate the effects of a color-coded, onset-rime,…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of high school tutors' implementation of "Great Leaps Reading" (Campbell, 1998), a reading fluency supplementary instructional program. The program consists of three sections: phonics, sight word phrases, and story passages. Daily 15-minute tutoring sessions involved repeated 1-minute timings of…

Data from instruments which are technically adequate and which inform instruction are not only considered best practice, but are legally mandated by laws such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act and No Child Left Behind. The Phonics Diagnostic Inventory (PDI) was designed to assess students' proficiency with specific…

For a number of students, early failure is highly predictive of later failure, severely limiting the development of skilled reading. Students who do not read fluently generally do not become good readers. In addition, students with inadequate fluency are likely to avoid reading because of fear of failure and negative attitudes--and students who…

The influential report "Teaching Children to Read: An Evidenced-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction," published by the National Reading Panel in 2000, presented recommendations for daily literacy instruction in five key areas: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency,…

In the action research project report, the teacher researchers found that many kindergarten and first-grade students did not have the reading readiness skills to be reading at their benchmark target. The purpose of the project was to improve the students overall reading ability. The dates of the project began on September 8 through December 20,…