Over the past 23 years, the national average for reading achievement among learners has ranked below grade level (Learned et al., 2019). The research focus was to understand why struggling readers' reading skills improved. Two research questions, two hypotheses, and two null hypotheses were developed for this study. No participants participated in…

Education reform in the United States is heavily regulated and has undergone various iterations in the past several decades. With each passing legislation, government mandates and educational initiatives become the focus of reform. School districts must constantly find ways to keep up with increasing state and federal accountability standards.…

In sociolinguistic contexts where standardized languages coexist with regional dialects, the study of differential item functioning is a valuable tool for examining certain linguistic uses or varieties as threats to score validity. From an ecological perspective, this paper describes three stages in the study of differential item functioning…

International large-scale assessments have gained much attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century, influencing education legislation in many countries. This includes Spain, where they have been used by successive governments to justify education policy change. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the PISA 2018 reading scores for…

Infographic text is a visual text in the form of a combination of images, graphics, illustrations, and typography that serves to facilitate readers in understanding information. Therefore, infographic text is presented with an attractive appearance by increasing the number of illustrations and a little text. The widespread use of infographic text…

Reading comprehension is essential for students' ability to build knowledge. Students' comprehension abilities can be enhanced by providing students with deliberate practice and formative feedback on reading comprehension strategies. iSTART is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that is designed to provide instruction in reading strategies with…

In international large-scale assessments, students may not be compelled to answer every test item: a student can decide to skip a seemingly difficult item or may drop out before the end of the test is reached. The way these missing responses are treated will affect the estimation of the item difficulty and student ability, and ultimately affect…

Studies have identified negative effects of cortisol, a stress hormone, on academic performance. Because natural disasters induce community-wide stress, students who experience natural disasters may subsequently perform worse academically. Our study is the first to examine the immediate effects of close exposure to a natural disaster on academic…

All individuals develop new skills over time and one important developmental stage is when individuals can learn in the absence of direct reinforcement. Behavior Analytic theories have stressed the importance of these emergent response repertoires and have consistently studied them across fields (i.e. Incidental Bidirectional Naming, Arbitrarily…

Primary Scientific Literature (PSL) significantly contributes to cultivating students' scientific literacy. However, students' visual strategies while reading PSL remain unclear. This study utilized eye-tracking technology to clarify students' visual attention allocation and fixation transactions during PSL reading, and explored their associations…

This study examined the independent contribution of morphological awareness and orthographic awareness in reading comprehension, controlling for working memory and reading fluency in Arabic-speaking children. Participants (N = 244) from grades four and five, were classified into typical comprehenders (n = 207) and poor comprehenders (n = 37). All…

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the reading comprehension program prepared for primary school fourth grade students on students' reading comprehension skills. In this context, students' attitudes toward reading, reading motivation, fluent reading skills and reading comprehension strategies were considered in the study. The…

The current study compared the reading growth of (a) students who received targeted interventions, (b) students who received typical school interventions, and (c) students who were proficient readers at the study's onset. The participants were 1,513 students in first through fifth grades who attended one of three treatment schools or one of three…

Group differences in test scores are a key metric in education policy. Response time offers novel opportunities for understanding these differences, especially in low-stakes settings. Here, we describe how observed group differences in test accuracy can be attributed to group differences in latent response speed or group differences in latent…

The purpose of this correlational study is to determine the nature of the relationship between school and demographic factors and student achievement using data from the individual schools reported by a school district in Northern Texas. Answers to the following questions were sought: Do the teacher demographic factors (years of experience,…