Many students are not prepared to meet the literacy demands of college and career as defined by the Common Core State Standards (2010). Literacy researchers have struggled to define the frequency and type of reading practice necessary to nurture the development of reading ability. The principles of deliberate practice provide a theoretical…

Despite the number of programs in Mississippi that focus on developing and training teachers, the State continues to face a critical teacher shortage. This non-experimental, ex-post facto, quantitative study investigated the America Reads-Mississippi (ARM) Future Teacher Corps (FTC) program, an AmeriCorps program in Mississippi with a mission to…

"Harvard Education Letter" is published bimonthly at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This issue of "Harvard Education Letter" contains the following articles: (1) Learning Progressions in Science: A New Approach Emphasizes Sustained Instruction in Big Ideas (Patti Hartigan); (2) Putting the "Boy Crisis" in…

This study evaluated the relative effects of Tier II computer-assisted tutoring in small groups (Team Alphie) and one-to-one tutoring provided to struggling readers in 33 high-poverty Success for All (SFA) schools. In this year-long study, struggling readers in the Team Alphie schools were tutored in groups of 6. In the control schools, students…

Educators today were concerned with how the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 dealt with the improvement of education throughout the United States. Schools should have put forth a greater effort and reduced the achievement gap between different groups of students based on race, gender, special education status, and if that student was economically…

State education departments, in discussions with Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast, identified low reading achievement as a critical issue for their students and expressed an interest in identifying effective strategies to promote the foundational skills in young students that might improve reading achievement. The Mississippi…

This paper is based on a study of the Success for All (SFA) reading program at two Mississippi elementary schools. In particular, the study investigated whether SFA was being implemented as advocated by its developers, students' reading scores on standardized achievement tests, how the program was monitored, attitudes toward reading, and what key…

Most instructors and administrators will refer to a student's lack of study and organizational skills to explain why so many freshmen students drop out or fail to continue with their educational goals. Often students graduate high schools without having to vigorously study and apply themselves in order to pass. As a result, many students enter…

A cornerstone of Mississippi's 1982 Education Reform Act, the Assistant Reading Instructor Program sought to improve basic skills acquisition by placing assistant reading instructors in primary grades. The program has not been effective in meeting its objectives. On standardized tests, students who had assistant reading instructors in the primary…

Describes the successful use of the beginning reading program called Sing, Spell, Read, and Write (SSRW) in Aberdeen (Mississippi) elementary schools. Using a whole language rather than basal reading approach and emphasizing phonics and total immersion, SSRW has been instrumental in dramatically improving achievement test scores and in combating…

A privately funded project that placed reading aides in the first three grades of the public schools was initiated in a rural county of Mississippi. The program provided a paraprofessional assistant reading instructor who worked under the direction of a classroom teacher to strengthen and enrich children's work in small groups or in an educational…

The effects of an integrated language arts instructional program on reading comprehension skills of learning lab students were examined using the Analytical Reading Inventory, and their attitudes toward recreational and academic reading were assessed using the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey. Subjects were at-risk fifth and sixth grade…

This article describes how a first-grade teacher used poetry to provide students of diverse ability levels with reading and language activities that stimulated their interest and improved basic skills. Activities with poetry included reading the poems aloud individually and as a group, discussing and analyzing the poems' words and meanings, and…