Several studies found that direct instruction and task structuring can effectively promote children's ability to design unconfounded experiments. The present study examined whether the impact of these interventions extends to other scientific reasoning skills by comparing the inquiry activities of 55 fifth-graders randomly assigned to one of…

The use of hypertext systems for learning and teaching complex and ill-structured domain of knowledge has been attracting attention in design of instruction. In this context, an experimental research has been conducted to explore the effectiveness of instructional design oriented hypertext systems. Cognitive flexibility hypertext theory is…

There is limited research demonstrating Direct Instruction (DI) as an effective reading comprehension intervention for students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and developmental disabilities (DD). Previous research has shown that DI, when portions of the program were implemented, resulted in increased skills (Flores & Ganz, 2007; Flores…

This study investigated the effects of the "Expressive Writing (EW)" direct instruction curriculum on the expository writing skills of secondary grade students with serious emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD). The "EW" program targets writing mechanics, sentence writing, and editing but does not include pre-writing…

As mandated by state and federal laws, students with disabilities have been mainstreamed into a general educational setting. The problem was these students exhibited behavior that interfered with their learning or the learning of other students. The perception of educators and administrators regarding social skills instruction for students with…

Motivated by computational analyses, we look at how teaching affects exploration and discovery. In Experiment 1, we investigated children's exploratory play after an adult pedagogically demonstrated a function of a toy, after an interrupted pedagogical demonstration, after a naive adult demonstrated the function, and at baseline. Preschoolers in…

This study examined the effectiveness, generalization, and maintenance of a multi-element intervention consisting of brief direct instruction social skill lessons, a prompting procedure, and a fading procedure to promote social engagement in an integrated lunchroom and playground setting for three elementary age students with developmental…

Both exploration and explicit instruction are thought to benefit learning in many ways, but much less is known about how the two can be combined. We tested the hypothesis that engaging in exploratory activities prior to receiving explicit instruction better prepares children to learn from the instruction. Children (159 second- to fourth-grade…

We taught 2 children with visual impairments to select a coin from an array using tactile cues after hearing its name and then to select a coin after hearing its value. Following the acquisition of these listener (receptive language) skills, we then observed the emergence of speaker (expressive language) skills without direct instruction.…

Research and history has demonstrated the overwhelming disparity and gap of mathematical achievement between African Americans and their White counterparts. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the achievement gap on a national level is prevalent. The USA jurisdiction has Black 8th grade math students results at 12%…

Methods of teaching reading skill are not the same in different countries. It depends on the condition and situation of the learners. Observing the method of teaching in Malaysia was the purpose of this study and the result of the study shows that there are 5 methods that are applied in classroom activities namely Grammar Translation Method (GTM),…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effects of the Direct Instruction REWARDS® program on reading complex words of two fifteen-year-old boys in a reading resource room. Both participants had difficulty in reading and were diagnosed as learning disabled. During baseline, both participants had difficulty in syllabication. The results showed…

The purpose of the study was two-fold: to (a) investigate the influence of explicit nature of science (NOS) and explicit argumentation instruction in the context of a socioscientific issue on the argumentation skills and NOS understandings of students, and (b) explore the transfer of students' NOS understandings and argumentation skills learned in…

This study examined the effects of scripted lessons (SLs) alone and in combination with guided notes during science instruction on science quiz scores of three elementary students with moderate to severe intellectual disability and autism. This study used a multiple probe across three science units design with replication across students and…

This document was prepared to assist literacy specialists in the national Regional Comprehensive Center network as they work with states to improve educational policy and practice in the area of adolescent literacy. It comprises three major parts: Part One: "Improving academic literacy instruction for students in grades 4-12." Based on…