LXD Research was engaged by 95 Percent Group to conduct a third-party, mixed-methods efficacy study of their 95 Phonics Core Program (95 PCP) to evaluate the impact on fourth and fifth grade literacy outcomes over the school year 2023-2024. LXD analyzed the formative assessment data from i-Ready, focusing on overall scale scores, subdomains, and…

Highly effective elementary teachers faced challenges to professional development which differed from their urban or suburban peers. With the increasing need for student proficiency in reading, strategies to help grow their engagement and motivation were necessary to investigate and apply to instructional habits. The purpose of this basic…

This ethnographic case study investigated literacy instruction and intervention practices within a Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework in upper elementary school. Multi-Tiered Systems of Support has been proposed as a system of schoolwide reform aimed to support students' academic and social-emotional development and is often used…

ELA Guidebooks is an English language arts curriculum for core instruction. Made by teachers for teachers, the ELA Guidebooks units ensure all students can read, understand, and express their understanding of complex, grade-level texts, ensuring their readiness for college or a career. Each text collection has a shared idea and contains authentic…

Background/Context: In 2010, Reading Recovery was awarded a $55 million Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of Education. This five-year grant supported the expansion of Reading Recovery in more than 1,400 schools in over 30 states, and provided intervention to over 80,000 students. Although a multi-site randomized…

As part of integrated instruction, educators aim to efficiently and simultaneously address learning goals across multiple subject areas like English language arts (ELA) and science or social studies. While studies are beginning to show that this instructional approach can be effective, it is challenging to implement in practice, requiring that…

The Every Student Succeed Act (ESSA) brings significant changes as well as opportunities for schools to improve their students' academic outcomes. One proposed regulation is for states to analyze the performance of student subgroups separately in order to show how states are levelling the playing field over time to ensure educational equity. This…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were adopted by most states by 2010. Yet, many teachers still lack confidence in their ability to integrate these standards into their classroom instruction and this uncertainty undermines their effectiveness. This article presents findings from a study of a fourth grade literacy curriculum informed by the…

English learners (ELs) often struggle with asking questions in the classroom. They frequently need support to become confident questioners when confusion arises during reading. This skill becomes even more significant when such learners transition into mainstream classrooms. One possible framework for helping ELs make this transition includes the…

Student goal setting and academic planning has been a major focus for PUSD, with the aim of increasing the level of student engagement and student ownership over their learning. Goal setting has been implemented in conjunction with the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) tests, which provide educators with a tool…

The purposes of the study were to conceptualize and operationally define three classes of the skills by which knowledge is acquired from written language, and determine whether the skills represent homogenous classes of behaviors and are hierarchically related. (Author/DG)

Experiments involving a componential approach to analogy training were conducted with 36 fourth, 34 eighth, and 96 tenth graders. Results indicate a significant positive effect on all students' verbal analogy skills and no significant effect on fourth graders' inferential skills. In-class training and reading/language arts instruction implications…

Many schools expect teachers to act as curriculum clerks, carrying out decisions about subject matter and classroom management. A promising new metaphor for professional educators is that of teacher as explorer, the leader of an expedition into unfamiliar territory. The image of explorer changes the perspective on teaching goals and roles and…

Uses response journals to explore the ways fourth-grade students respond to literature. Finds factors necessary to mesh text and a reader's personal experiences: a classroom atmosphere that encourages risk-taking; daily opportunities to read and respond; a wide variety of choices in reading materials; modeling of good reading strategies; and…

Developed for grades kindergarten through four, this book contains activities for using the newspaper as an educational resource for content area instruction. The first two sections of the book offer a pretest for determining how much students use newspapers and what they know about newspapers, and introductory information on newspaper components…