Describes the evolution and testing of an inservice special education teacher training project in which teachers engaged in collaborative strategy instruction with small groups of severely reading-delayed adolescents. An analysis of videotaped pre- and posttest reading sessions showed significant gains in many dimensions related to fostering…

Describes a program that teaches reading and thinking strategies through a student-centered, literature-based curriculum designed to increase students' cognitive strategy use, reading achievement, self-esteem, and critical-thinking abilities. An experiment demonstrated that 178 elementary school students in the program outperformed 174 control…

After reading a brief summary of the transactional strategies approach and watching 2 videotapes of its implementation in the classroom, 30 elementary school teachers were asked about their perceptions of this educational strategy. Teachers' first impressions of the transactional strategies approach were positive, although they expressed a few…

Interviews and observations revealed that only two of seven teachers fully accepted the Students Achieving Independent Learning (SAIL) program, a strategies-based approach to reading instruction. A major challenge seemed to be that the teachers did not know how to coordinate SAIL with other reading instruction. (MDM)

One teacher taught same story for three years to three groups of low-achieving second graders. An interaction-tracking and coding scheme was used to detect changes in student and teacher interaction patterns. By year three, students participated more actively in story discussion and used strategies with less teacher prompting. These changes…

Four first-hand accounts chronicle a professor's presentation of the reciprocal teaching strategy and other teaching strategies in a graduate education course and three teachers' implementation of these strategies in classrooms at grades one, four, and seven. Teachers learned to use strategies in combination to produce results that differed from…

Three teachers who had used reciprocal teaching for at least a year were observed and interviewed as part of an effort to develop a model of reciprocal teaching that would work well in classrooms. These teachers used conventional reciprocal teaching as a starting point for creating instruction they believed to be more powerful and effective than…

Assessed elementary teachers' attitudes toward reading instruction, the role of basal readers in reading instruction, and the needs fulfilled for students, teachers, parents, and school administrators through classroom reading instruction. Found a conflict between teachers' beliefs and their reported methods of teaching. (MM)

Attempting to increase reading engagement, a collaborative team implemented a year-long integration of reading/language arts and science instruction known as Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). Compared to traditionally organized instruction, the CORI context increased strategy use, conceptual learning, and text comprehension more than…

Used classroom observations and in-depth interviews to study first-grade teachers nominated as outstanding or typical in ability to help students develop literacy skills. Characteristics of teachers whose students demonstrated highest achievement included (1) coherent and thorough integration of skills with high-quality reading/writing…

Investigated school and classroom factors related to primary-grade reading achievement in schools with moderate to high numbers of students receiving subsidized lunch. Statistically significant factors included parent-school relationship, systematic assessment, small-group instruction, independent reading, student on-task behavior, strong home…

Examines one teacher and her first graders' interactions around information book read-alouds. Reveals that the comprehension strategies the teacher modeled reflected the same categories as those suggested by more systematic but decontextualized research. Suggests that there may be a developmentally appropriate time to begin formal comprehension…

In this article we present results from a project to develop survey measures of the content knowledge teachers need to teach elementary reading. In areas such as mathematics and science, there has been great interest in the specialized ways teachers need to know a subject to teach it to others -- often referred to as pedagogical content knowledge.…

In this article we examine methodological and conceptual issues that emerge when researchers measure the enacted curriculum in schools. After outlining key theoretical considerations that guide measurement of this construct and alternative strategies for collecting and analyzing data on it, we illustrate one approach to gathering and analyzing…

Spanish-dominant bilingual students in grades 2-5 were tutored 3 times per week for 40 minutes over 10 weeks, using 2 English reading interventions. Tutoring took place from February through April of 1 school year. One, Read Well, combined systematic phonics instruction with practice in decodable text, and the other, a revised version of Read…