There are large gaps in reading skills by family income among school-aged children in the United States. Correlational evidence suggests that reading skills are strongly related to the amount of reading students do outside of school. Experimental evidence testing whether this relationship is causal is lacking. We report the results from a…

Even with current evidence-based preschool programming efforts for children from high-risk backgrounds, many children vary in their skill levels at school entry. The authors examined the influence of using an evidence-based literacy curriculum during a 6-week summer program. The authors documented improvements in children's letter-naming,…

A growing body of evidence indicates that the test scores of low-income children drop significantly relative to their higher-income counterparts during the summer months. This study finds that a well-implemented summer learning program can improve reading skills and increase the extent to which parents encourage their children to read during the…