Browse the Complete MCPER Library
This study examined the differential effects of Strategies for Reading Informational Text and Vocabulary Effectively (STRIVE) on the vocabulary, reading comprehension, and content learning among 4,757 fourth-grade students with and without disabilities. Schools were assigned to one of three conditions: researcher-supported professional development (RPD), school-supported professional development (SPD), or business as...
Most educators think of professional development (PD) as a way to influence the uptake of evidence-based practices. However, PD can also play an important role in sustaining the practices over time—a critical ingredient for improving outcomes for all students. A number of studies have identified key features of...
This resource gathers effective evidence-based strategies for reaching students with various learning abilities onto one cue card or bookmark that is portable and easy to use. These strategies can help reach all students in diverse classrooms across grade levels and content areas. The front lists the features of differentiated instruction,...
No matter how a teacher provides feedback—verbally or visually, to a group or one on one, publicly or subtly—the goal is the same: to improve students’ academic and behavioral outcomes. Feedback is a simple practice that requires little active planning but has a significant impact. This brief describes...
This resource lists tools, including apps and paper-based systems, to help your teen with executive function skills.
When recommending a program to achieve objectives such as improving learning outcomes for middle school students, school psychologists need information about cost effectiveness to identify the best fit for student needs and school budgets. However, few cost studies of evidence-based instructional programs exist. We compared the cost effectiveness...
Anxiety is categorized by persistent worry or fear regarding lack of control over external threats (events or situations) or internal threats (health or thoughts). These threats can be realistic, such as an upcoming test or game, or unrealistic, such as a comet striking Earth or an alien abduction. Negative thoughts...
The Strategies for Reading Information and Vocabulary Effectively (STRIVE) professional development (PD) model was developed through funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. As part of this research project, a cadre of upper-elementary school teachers worked closely with researchers at The University of Texas at...
The Strategies for Reading Information and Vocabulary Effectively (STRIVE) professional development (PD) model was developed through funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. As part of this research project, a cadre of upper-elementary school teachers worked closely with researchers at The University of Texas at...
The Strategies for Reading Information and Vocabulary Effectively (STRIVE) professional development (PD) model was designed through funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. As part of this research project, a cadre of upper-elementary school teachers worked closely with researchers at The University of...
Many words that students read in middle school have two or more syllables. These are called multisyllabic words. As children progress through school, the number of multisyllabic words they encounter in texts increases. When struggling readers are confronted with long words in their school texts, they often give up or...
Middle school students with dyslexia are challenged by increasingly complex text, greater word length, more advanced writing assignments, and unfamiliar content and vocabulary. Academic words in middle school texts are commonly three syllables or more, requiring more advanced decoding skills. As students encounter hundreds of new and unfamiliar words in...
Students are asked to determine whether statements make sense and, if not, to identify the words that show why a statement doesn't make sense.
Turn and talk is an instructional routine in which students use content knowledge during a brief conversation with a peer. Students are provided with a short prompt to discuss content or a skill. Students turn to their predetermined partner and answer the prompt while their partner listens. Then, the partners...
This presentatation by MCPER Executive Director Sharon Vaughn was given at the Central Texas Dyslexia Conference on October 19. The conference, organized by Austin Independent School District, is held annually in October, which is Dyslexia Awareness Month.
This simultaneous replication single-case design study investigated a vocabulary and main idea intervention with an aspect of text choice provided to students with autism spectrum disorder. Five middle school students with autism spectrum disorder participated in two instructional groups taught by school-based personnel. Results were initially...
This article serves as an exemplar for other effectiveness studies that may not replicate findings from previous efficacy trials. Beginning in 2002, researchers developed, implemented, and evaluated the efficacy of an English reading intervention for first-grade English learners using multiple randomized control trials (RCTs). As aresult of this...
Students in middle school classes are increasingly expected to learn social studies content using text sources (Toste, Fuchs, & Fuchs, 2013). To keep up with today’s literacy demands and be adequately prepared for postsecondary success, students need to be able to...
This guide is organized by commonly experienced challenges (e.g., lack of modeling) to teachers implementing evidence-based adolescent literacy practices with fidelity. Also provided are an explanation of each challenge and resources from established organizations and research centers that instructional leaders can use to address these challenges. Some of...
Specific learning disability (SLD) is the most common eligibility category through which students receive special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In Texas alone, more than 150,000 students received special education services in the 2016–2017 school year due to an identified SLD (Texas Education Agency, 2017). The rules and...
Understanding is the primary goal of reading. Strong reading comprehension is critical to student success in all subjects. As students move into higher grades, the texts they read become increasingly complex. Upper-grade texts are often dense, packed with important concepts and technical vocabulary. Students need to be aware of when...
Neural markers for reading-related changes in response to intervention may represent biomarkers that could inform intervention plans as a potential index of the malleability of the reading network in struggling readers. Particularly interesting is the role of activation outside the reading network, especially in executive control networks important for...
Six focus groups across two states were conducted to explore the potential benefits, possible challenges, and further considerations of two proposed academic interventions under development. These interventions target the reading comprehension of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. The purpose was to examine the reading comprehension treatments...
Reading in content area subjects, such as social studies, is challenging for many students. To achieve at high levels, students must navigate complex facts and technical words to grasp key ideas. Students also must spend a great deal of time reading a variety of text types, such as textbooks, novels,...
Your child gets home after a long day at school and you ask, “Do you have any homework?” Does your child complain and say something like, “Yes, but I don’t want to do it!” or “Yes, but it’s too hard”?...
Students with disabilities are often included in general education social studies classes, but these classes can differ in the achievement level of the overall class, including wide variation in content-related background knowledge, reading achievement, or both. The purpose of this study was to examine how background knowledge and reading achievement...
Understanding the factors that mediate the effect of educational or behavioral intervention is critical to advancing both research and practice. When properly implemented, mediators add depth to the results of intervention research, indicating why a program works, highlighting ways to enhance its effectiveness, and revealing the elements that are essential...
The authors examined social studies teachers’ use of text and supports for reading text during their instruction as well as how their practices related to students’ content acquisition. A total of 37 social studies teachers and their students (n = 572) participated and recorded their instruction during three...
The authors examined the efficacy of an after-school multicomponent reading intervention for third- through fifth-grade students with reading difficulties. A total of 419 students were identified for participation based on a 90 standard score or below on a screening measure of the Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension. Participating students were...
The authors examined the effectiveness of a researcher‐provided reading intervention with 484 fourth-graders with significant reading difficulties. Students were randomly assigned to 1 year of intervention, 2 years of intervention, or a business‐as‐usual comparison condition (BAU). Students assigned to 2 years of intervention demonstrated significantly greater gains in reading fluency than...
Within multitiered instructional delivery models, progress monitoring is a key mechanism for determining whether a child demonstrates an adequate response to instruction. One measure commonly used to monitor the reading progress of students is oral reading fluency (ORF). This study examined the extent to which ORF slope predicts reading comprehension...
The authors examined the efficacy of a content acquisition and reading comprehension intervention implemented in eighth-grade social studies classrooms. Using a within-teacher randomized control design, 18 eighth-grade teachers’ social studies classes were randomly assigned to a treatment or comparison condition. Teachers taught all their classes (treatment and comparison) using the...
Recent reading research implicates executive control regions as sites of difference in struggling readers. However, as studies often employ only reading or language tasks, the extent of deviation in control engagement in children with reading difficulties is not known. The current study investigated activation in reading and executive control brain...
Partner reading is an instructional routine that incorporates peer modeling into reading text. In the routine, one partner reads a text that is slightly challenging while the other partner corrects errors and checks for understanding. It is most effective to pair students so that one partner is a slightly more...
This flyer for parents provides five research-based strategies and examples for supporting adolescents' writing development. Both English and Spanish versions are available.
This flyer provides five questions that parents can ask as a starting point to gauge the quality of a school's behavioral supports. Both English and Spanish versions are available.
From the introduction to the article: Ms. Baxter spends fourth period every day in an eighth-grade general education social studies class where she supports the needs of students with disabilities. She monitors students’ work and checks in with students (Murawski & Swanson, 2001), typically...
Understanding the efficacy of evidence-based reading practices delivered in the Tier 1 (i.e., general classroom) setting is critical to successful implementation of multitiered systems, meeting a diverse range of student learning needs, and providing high-quality reading instruction across content areas. This meta-analysis presents evidence on the effects of Tier 1 reading...
This resource contains sample materials for using the PACT instructional procedures in English language arts, science, and social studies classrooms.
This article discusses two research-based approaches to integrate reading comprehension and content knowledge instruction—Promoting Adolescents’ Comprehension of Text and Collaborative Strategic Reading.
Supporting the reading comprehension and content knowledge acquisition of English language learners (ELs) requires instructional practices that continue beyond developing the foundational skills of reading. In particular, the challenges ELs face highlight the importance of teaching reading comprehension practices in the middle grades through content acquisition. The authors conducted a...
Most students with disabilities are expected to enter the workforce after high school or attend postsecondary institutions to engage in further study (Cortiella & Horowitz, 2014). Working knowledge of the general curriculum from content area classes (e.g., civics, history, science, English language arts) serves students well during middle school,...
Middle school students are expected to read and comprehend upper-level text. You might be wondering whether there are things you can do at home to improve your child’s reading skills. Partner reading is an easy way to do just that by providing your child with more reading practice!...
This study determined the efficacy of a content knowledge and reading comprehension treatment implemented by eighth-grade social studies teachers over 1 school year. We randomly assigned eighth-grade students with reading difficulties to the intervention treatment condition (n = 45) or the business-as-usual comparison condition (n = 33). Students in the treatment condition scored statistically higher...
This document describes five considerations to support struggling readers. Both English and Spanish versions are available.
This resource provides practitioners and parents with links to many resources for addressing low literacy levels among adolescents, including the IRIS Center at Vanderbilt University, MCPER, and the Center on Instruction. Evidence-based practices are also highlighted.
This study investigated the typical reading practices provided to students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) at a residential and day treatment setting in the Northeast. Observations of reading instruction and teacher interviews were completed over the course of the 2013-2014 school year. The majority of students in observed reading...
This study reports findings from an exploration of the literacy practices of 10 high school science teachers. Based on observations of teachers’ instruction, the authors report teachers’ use of text, evidence-based vocabulary and comprehension practices, and grouping practices. Based on interviews with teachers, the authors also report teachers’...
This study investigated how measures of decoding, fluency, and comprehension in middle school students overlap with one another; whether the pattern of overlap differs between struggling and typical readers; and the relative frequency of different types of reading difficulties. The 1,748 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students were oversampled for struggling readers ...
This article reflects a metaview of the work of the three research projects funded through the Institute of Education Sciences under the Reading for Understanding competition that addressed middle grade through high school readers (grades 4–12). All three projects shared the assumption that instruction is necessary for successful reading...
Skill in generating inferences predicts reading comprehension for students in the elementary and intermediate grades even after taking into account word reading, vocabulary knowledge, and cognitive ability (Cain et al., 2004; Kendeou et al., 2008; Oakhill & Cain, 2012; Oakhill et al., 2003). While research shows that struggling readers are less likely than proficient...
The history of research on interventions for struggling readers in grades 4 through 12 dates back to 19th century case studies of seemingly intelligent children who were unable to learn to read. Physicians, psychologists, educators, and others were determined to help them. In the process, they launched a century of...
This study aimed to determine the efficacy of a content knowledge and reading comprehension treatment implemented by eighth-grade social studies teachers over the course of 1 school year. The authors randomly assigned eighth-grade students with reading difficulties to the intervention treatment condition or the business-as-usual comparison...
Kelly Williams presented this professional development session at the 2016 CEC Convention in St. Louis, Missouri. Williams presented on behalf of Dr. Jessica Toste and shared her work on multisyllabic word reading instruction for upper-elementary students.
Spelling is one of the most challenging areas for students with learning disabilities (LD), and improving spelling outcomes for these students is of high importance. In this synthesis, the authors examined the effects of spelling and reading interventions on spelling outcomes for students with LD in kindergarten through grade 12....
Today’s social studies teachers and students face an unprecedented time of standards and accountability. Students bring influences that may interact with the instructional context teachers provide for learning. U.S. history students in 8th and 11th grades (n = 512) from 11 schools (23 teachers), diverse in location, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status,...
This article won the Kirk Award for best research article in Learning Disabilities Research & Practice of 2015. The authors examined cognitive attributes, attention, and self-efficacy of fourth-grade struggling readers who were identified as adequate responders (n = 27), inadequate responders with only comprehension deficits (n = 46), and inadequate responders with...
Based on the analysis of 620 think-aloud verbal protocols from students in grades 7, 9, and 11, this study examined students' conscious engagement in inference generation, paraphrasing, verbatim text repetition, and monitoring while reading narrative or informational texts that were either at or above the students' current reading levels. Students were randomly assigned...
This study aimed to determine the efficacy of a content knowledge and reading comprehension treatment implemented by eighth-grade general education social studies teachers among students with disabilities included in the classes. Data on students with disabilities across 2 years of study were combined for the analysis presented here. Students in the...
Inexpensive software applications designed to teach reading, writing, mathematics, and other academic areas have become increasingly popular. Although previous research has demonstrated the potential efficacy of such applications, there is a paucity of research that compares applications instruction (AI) with traditional teacher-directed instruction (TDI), and the relative effectiveness and efficiency...
This study examines the efficacy of team-based learning implemented in 11th-grade social studies classrooms. Findings suggest the treatment group outperformed the control group in terms of content acquisition and that a group of students classified with low pretest scores did not benefit from the treatment.
The authors provide examples of the valuable knowledge special education research has generated, including the elements of response to intervention, such as screening and progress monitoring; instructional practices, such as systematic instruction and feedback; and intensive interventions designed to meet the specific learning needs of...
The authors examined the effects of team-based learning implemented in grade 8 social studies classes on student content acquisition. Results indicated that team-based learning was implemented only in treatment classes and that teachers demonstrated a novice level of implementation. The authors then examined...
This article evaluates the efficacy of the Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text intervention implemented with 11th-grade students in U.S. history classes. Findings suggest there are no differences between treatment and comparison groups on measures of social studies reading comprehension or more general reading comprehension.
This study reports vocabulary and reading comprehension instructional practices implemented in middle and high school social studies and language arts classrooms. The proportion of time spent reading text was roughly the same across the two subjects, with differences by text type, reading mode, and grade level...
This article discusses the importance of enhancing the impact of reading instruction by reinforcing and articulating connections within and between intervention tiers. Specifically, it focuses on the potential of (a) fortified Tier 1 foundations, (b) aligned Tier 1 and Tier 2 interventions, (c) bridged instruction to support critical reading...
This experimental study examined the effects of integrating teacher-directed knowledge-building and student-regulated comprehension practices in 7th- to 10th-grade English language arts classes. It also investigated the effect of instructional quality and whether integrating practices differentially benefited students with lower entry-level reading comprehension. Students in...
This study is aimed to replicate findings that show an impact on the reading comprehension and social studies content learning of eighth-grade students. Findings show that students in the treatment condition outperformed those in the comparison condition at all time points.
This study extends the research on adolescents' motivation for reading. It looks at important group differences and the relation of motivation to standardized achievement. Participants are in grades 7–12. Findings suggest that motivational beliefs as a group and individually were able to predict students' performance on a standardized measure...
Previous research has shown that treating dependent effect sizes as independent inflates the variance of the mean effect size and introduces bias by giving studies with more effect sizes more weight in the meta-analysis. This article summarizes the different approaches to handling dependence that have been ...
This study examines differences in adolescents' reading comprehension strategy use as it relates to reading proficiency, grade level, and gender. It also investigates the factor structure and psychometric properties of a newly developed scenario-based self-report survey. Participants are from grades 7–12. Findings suggest adequate comprehenders report higher...
The purpose of this chapter is to provide educators an overview of instructional practices in reading that are associated with improved learning outcomes with students K-8 who have a mild-to-moderate learning disability.
This study discusses Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) and its effects on students' ability to retrieve content. Eighth-grade students participated for 2 years. Findings suggest that an instructional emphasis on deep processing leads to better content recall.
This article examined the effectiveness of implementing team-based learning practices on content acquisition for 11th-grade students with high-incidence disabilities enrolled in general education social studies courses. Results indicated no statistically significant differences between groups on a measure of content knowledge, although a moderate effect size was...
This study evaluates the relations of reading comprehension, decoding, working memory, and attentional control of students in grades 6–12. Findings suggest different aspects of attentional control are important for decoding versus comprehension.
This study examines the impact of reading intervention on ratings of student attention over time. Participants include middle school students. Findings suggest that intensive, response-based reading intervention over 3 years may improve reading achievement and behavioral attention in middle school struggling readers where reading influences attention.
This experimental study examined the effects of a multicomponent reading comprehension intervention in sixth- to eighth-grade English language arts classes with a focus on factors to enhance treatment implementation. The researches tested the contribution of a theoretically derived fidelity framework that included adherence, quality, dosage, program differentiation,...
This study examines whether accuracy in text consistency judgments account for variance in reading comprehension for students in grades 6–12. Findings suggest growth across the middle school and high school years, particularly for adequate comprehenders.
This study examined secondary-level students’ patterns of responding and the prevalence and impact of non-attempted items on a timed, group-administered, multiple-choice test of reading comprehension. Scores of the lowest-achieving subgroup were affected significantly by high rates of nonattempted items, particularly on the later third ...
This study evaluated oral reading fluency probes for middle school students. Participants consisted of students with and without reading difficulties. Findings suggest that full passage probes versus 60-second probes identify a slightly higher percentage of at-risk students with reading difficulties.
Effect sizes can be interpreted in a meaningful context by benchmarking them against typical growth for students in the normative distribution. Such benchmarks are not currently available for students in the bottom quartile. This report remedies this issue by providing a comparative context for interventions involving these...
This study focuses on oral reading fluency with regards to student characteristics (e.g., sight word reading efficiency, verbal knowledge) and text features (e.g., passage difficulty, genre) for middle school students. Findings support that student text characteristics and text features should be considered while assessing individual differences in oral...
This study used meta-analytic techniques to synthesize quantitative research studies that examined the effects of literacy instruction set in social studies classrooms (grades 6–12) on students' academic content learning and reading comprehension. An extensive search of the scholarly literature between 1983 and 2013 yielded a total of 12 intervention studies that...
This booklet is a resource for classroom teachers in Texas who work with the English language learner population. Words included were selected from the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills to identify vocabulary that will help students learn content and skills represented on statewide assessments. Comprehensive word lists and...
Despite data supporting the benefits of early reading interventions, there has been little evaluation of the long-term educational impact of these interventions, with most follow-up studies lasting less than 2 years (Suggate, 2010). This study evaluated reading outcomes more than a decade after the completion of an 8-month reading intervention, using a...
Readers construct mental models of situations described by text to comprehend what they read, updating these situation models based on explicitly described and inferred information about causal, temporal, and spatial relations. Fluent adult readers update their situation models while reading narrative text, based in part on spatial location information that...
The authors report the effects of a single-case, multiple-probe design investigation for students with learning disabilities (LD) in grades 4 and 5. Seven students classified as LD and with persistent difficulty with informational-text comprehension from two elementary schools participated. The study compared social studies learning across two conditions: a text-based summarization baseline...
A 2-year, randomized control trial with 9th- to 10th-grade students with significant reading problems was provided for 50 minutes a day in small groups. Comparison students were provided an elective class and treatment students the reading intervention. Students identified as demonstrating reading difficulties through failure on their state accountability test and...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the academic responding of students at risk for reading difficulties in beginning reading instruction. Opportunities for kindergarten students at risk for reading difficulties to respond academically during teacher-facilitated reading instruction in the general education classroom were examined in relation to...
This longitudinal study examined the second-grade reading outcomes of 368 children who participated in either experimental or school-designed supplemental intervention in kindergarten and the influence and interactions of learner variables and type of intervention on reading achievement. Descriptive findings indicated that percentages of students identified as at risk or not...
This study used a large statewide database to examine the oral reading fluency development of second- and third-grade students with emotional disturbance or learning disabilities and their general education peers. Oral reading fluency measures were administered to 185,367 students without disabilities (general education), 2,146 students identified with an emotional disturbance, and 10,339 students...
The authors systematically review studies that used computer-based graphic organizers for students with learning disabilities. A comprehensive search yielded 12 studies, which were coded and analyzed. The authors investigated the effectiveness of the treatments on academic outcomes and selected instructional and methodological features for evaluation to delineate practical...
The authors synthesized reading intervention studies conducted between 1980 and 2012 with K-12 students identified with autism spectrum disorders. Nine single-subject design studies, one quasi-experimental study, and two single-group design studies met the criteria for inclusion. Findings indicate that modifying instructional interventions associated with improved comprehension for students with reading difficulties may...
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