The implementation of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in Mississippi required third graders to prove mastery in reading before promotion to the fourth grade. This mixed model method of research investigated the achievement test scores of fourth and fifth grade students that were not accountable for passing the Third Grade Summative Reading…

An alarming number of people cannot read or are only functionally literate, particularly in Arkansas. Reading is an essential skill for health, well-being, and and economic advancement of individuals and families. Literacy is a lifelong gateway to knowledge, and with knowledge comes power. To increase functional literacy, classroom reading…

Public school leaders have searched for solutions to disruptive student behavior and its effect on academic concerns. As a result, research-based behavior models such as school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) were used to adjust student behavior with the goal of improving academic achievement; therefore, there is a necessity to understand…

Central coherence is the ability to perceive and connect salient information in a context such as a narrative text. Weak central coherence theory describes a detail-focused cognitive style of processing information that overlooks connections. This style of processing is a shortcoming of individuals with autism compared to typically developing…

This study describes the relationship between phonemic awareness and the reading achievement of kindergarten students. The purpose of this quantitative, time series, a two-year study was conducted to examine why some kindergarteners are not phonemically aware when leaving kindergarten and entering first grade. This study hypothesizes that…

This case study investigated the culturally responsive and reading comprehension instructional strategies used by one teacher who successfully supported the reading achievement of Black students labeled with a learning disability. The study explored the relationship between research-based reading comprehension instruction and culturally responsive…

Given recent calls for integrating metacognitive strategy instruction in classrooms and current models of self-regulated learning that emphasize the importance of skilled metacognitive monitoring throughout the reading process (Azevedo, 2009a; de Bruin, & van Gog, 2012; Dent & Hoyle, 2015), this study investigated the effects of…

The present work reviewed the literature associated with the low levels of student achievement in literacy among early grade students in Brazil, the problem of practice. Under an ecological systems theory perspective, I identified that the usage of assessments, phonological awareness instruction, and quality learning materials could be key factors…

In this book, the author challenges reductive views of emergent literacy prevalent in many of today's kindergarten and pre-K classrooms. As an alternative, Lysaker explains how reading wordless books with young children helps them to develop a range of comprehension abilities that are important for understanding narrative texts. Readers will find…

In this article, Michelle Ann Abate examines the typographical features of the comics and graphic novels frequently finding their way into English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms and challenges the viewpoint that they are secondary to prose-only texts, arguing instead that many comics can be seen as requiring more advanced levels of literacy…

In this quasi-experimental study, 608 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students explored 5 historical investigations. In the experimental condition, teachers used a cognitive apprenticeship model to teach students historical reading and writing strategies. Comparison teachers used the same materials to deliver a business-as-usual form of…

Currently, much research on cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) focuses on the development of statistical models estimating individual students' attribute profiles. However, little is known about how to communicate model-generated statistical results to stakeholders, and how to translate formatively diagnostic information into teaching…

Purpose: This work describes community-based participatory research (CBPR) to support language and literacy development with Pre-K and kindergarten African American boys. Method: The aim and goals of the project were designed using the CBPR model. Interventionists were trained with researcher-designed videos. Interventionist fidelity to training…

In the late 1980s Batia Laufer worked with teachers who believed that to understand a text it was enough to understand 80% of the text's word tokens. In response, Laufer set out to calculate the minimal text coverage, i.e., percentage of running words in a text the reader should understand to comprehend it reasonably well. In 1992, she explored…

The importance of alignment between identification processes and program design is widely noted in gifted and talented education literature. We analyzed publicly available district gifted program plans (Grades 3-5) from two states to examine the extent to which district identification practices matched intervention strategies. Our team developed a…