The appropriateness of innovative educational concepts for students from a low socioeconomic status (SES) or ethnic minority background is sometimes called into question. Disadvantaged students are supposed to benefit more from traditional approaches with Programmatic Instruction (PI). We examined Developmental Education (DE), an innovative…

Literacy engagement is critical to the development of reading proficiency. Yet, many students, having had varied and often limited experiences with formal literacy practices, begin schooling in an interstitial state that might more accurately be called "pre-engagement" where though eager to learn, they are unsure how to fully focus on…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to investigate the impact of the READ 180 reading intervention program upon the affective and cognitive reading skills of 21 struggling ninth grade at-risk students at a Title I high school in Southern California. There was minimal qualitative analysis of the READ 180 program at the secondary level…

This commentary invites Americans to confront what these authors view as the travesty that typically passes for literacy instruction for older youth in the United States who struggle with reading. In too many U.S. schools, these young people face an impoverished curriculum, receiving literacy instruction that is ill suited to their needs, or…

Since the 2003-04 school year, Save the Children, U.S. Programs, has supported programming designed to improve reading skills among struggling students in rural areas. The literacy program includes both afterschool and in-school interventions with small groups of children. These are implemented by well-trained paraprofessionals and are designed to…

In recent years there have been several attempts at integrating the research on reading. Snow, Burns, and Griffin (1998) delineated three areas of knowledge that, if appropriately dealt with, will prevent reading difficulties: knowledge of the alphabetic principle, fluency, and comprehension. Snow, Burns, and Griffin suggest that these areas…

In the spring of 1998 the National Research Council released a report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children for Adult Learning and Literacy (PRD). PRD was written with the goal of contributing to the prevention of reading difficulties by documenting the contributions of research to an understanding of reading development and the…