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This article reflects a metaview of the work of the three research projects funded through the Institute for 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 to learn just as it is for learning to read. Through multiple studies conducted independently, the three projects arrived at common themes and features of productive instruction for reading for understanding with adolescent readers. These common themes are elaborated with instructional examples and include the following: (a) Students purposefully engage with multiple forms of texts and actively process them, (b) instructional routines incorporate social support for reading through a variety of participation structures, and (c) instruction supports new content learning by leveraging prior knowledge and emphasizing key constructs and vocabulary.

As the popularity of project‐based learning grows, so does the importance of understanding how this instructional approach can support students’ learning and development. The authors describe a project‐based approach to literacy and social studies instruction that research has shown to be effective. Key characteristics of the approach and illustrations of how those characteristics are enacted in a project‐based learning geography unit are identified. In the unit, students develop informational reading and persuasive writing skills and learn key social studies content and skills by engaging in the development of brochures about their local community for an authentic audience. The authors also describe how educators can navigate common challenges that can arise when transitioning to a project‐based approach.

The author explores the Names, Journeys, and Dreams project, in which culturally and linguistically diverse learners and their families engaged with picturebooks that inspired dialogic conversations, authentic writing, and family–school connections. The author provides four recommendations for incorporating picturebooks within the reading support class with diverse learners: enter the storyworld together, make families the curriculum, value multiple languages, and celebrate students as authors. Alongside sustained and reciprocal family engagement efforts that position families as instructional resources, centering diverse picturebooks within the intervention setting can help students grow more fully into their identities as readers, writers, and dreamers.

Often coauthored by university‐ and school‐based educators, preservice teachers, and youths, this department column considers how literacies are best developed through context‐crossing partnerships among university, school, and community constituents.

BackgroundEducational robotics (ER) is increasingly used in classrooms to implement activities aimed at fostering the development of students’ computational thinking (CT) skills. Though previous works have proposed different models and frameworks to describe the underlying concepts of CT, very few have discussed how ER activities should be implemented in classrooms to effectively foster CT skill development. Particularly, there is a lack of operational frameworks, supporting teachers in the design, implementation, and assessment of ER activities aimed at CT skill development. The current study therefore presents a model that allows teachers to identify relevant CT concepts for different phases of ER activities and aims at helping them to appropriately plan instructional interventions. As an experimental validation, the proposed model was used to design and analyze an ER activity aimed at overcoming a problem that is often observed in classrooms: the trial-and-error loop, i.e., an over-investment in programming with respect to other tasks related to problem-solving.ResultsTwo groups of primary school students participated in an ER activity using the educational robot Thymio. While one group completed the task without any imposed constraints, the other was subjected to an instructional intervention developed based on the proposed model. The results suggest that (i) a non-instructional approach for educational robotics activities (i.e., unlimited access to the programming interface) promotes a trial-and-error behavior; (ii) a scheduled blocking of the programming interface fosters cognitive processes related to problem understanding, idea generation, and solution formulation; (iii) progressively adjusting the blocking of the programming interface can help students in building a well-settled strategy to approach educational robotics problems and may represent an effective way to provide scaffolding.ConclusionsThe findings of this study provide initial evidence on the need for specific instructional interventions on ER activities, illustrating how teachers could use the proposed model to design ER activities aimed at CT skill development. However, future work should investigate whether teachers can effectively take advantage of the model for their teaching activities. Moreover, other intervention hypotheses have to be explored and tested in order to demonstrate a broader validity of the model.

This meta-analysis synthesizes results from expository text structure interventions designed to increase comprehension for students in kindergarten to grade 12 published between 1970 and 2013. Twenty-one studies were identified, 19 of which met criteria for a meta-analysis, including 48 studywise effect sizes that were meta-analyzed to determine (a) how effective expository text structure interventions are in improving comprehension and (b) what features of expository text structure interventions (e.g., number of text structures taught, type of implementer) are associated with improved comprehension outcomes. A random-effects analysis yielded a significant mean effect of .95 overall and a significant mean effect of 1 for researcherdeveloped comprehension measures. Moderator analyses indicated significant differences in student comprehension outcomes, favoring researchers as implementers, 11-20 hours of interventions, one or two text structures taught, and students in the elementary grades. Instructional features of expository text structure interventions and implications for research and practice are discussed.

Students with limited vocabulary knowledge are at high risk for reading comprehension difficulties. Previous studies have found that teaching morphology may support vocabulary growth. In the present study, the authors aimed to replicate and extend these findings by investigating both immediate and long-term transfer effects to untaught words and untaught pseudowords with well-known root morphemes. Fifth-grade students (N = 332) were randomly assigned to a morphological intervention, an alternative vocabulary intervention, or a control condition. The morphological intervention was found to produce large short-term effects with respect to the students’ abilities to segment and explain both taught and untaught words containing taught morphemes, and medium effects on explanations of likely meanings of pseudowords with well-known root morphemes. Medium to large effects were still present 10 months later with taught words and transfer words. Training had a small effect on reading comprehension with trained words but no effect on standard measures of reading comprehension or vocabulary.

In Haiti, 49% of students cannot read a single word in Creole by the time they start grade 3, which is reflective of a broader learning crisis in low-income and fragile contexts. Read to Learn, an early-grade literacy intervention, was implemented and evaluated from fall 2014 through spring 2016 with the aim of improving students’ reading skills. Students were given learning materials in their mother tongue, teachers were provided with training and instructional coaching, and various supports for program implementation were established. In a randomized evaluation, the authors assessed students’ reading skills at the beginning of grade 1 and at the end of grades 1 and 2 in treatment and control schools. The authors estimated the impact of the program at the end of grades 1 and 2 with a hierarchical linear model and found positive effects on emergent reading skills and oral reading fluency, with effect sizes ranging between 0.19 and 0.79. The results of this study are an important contribution to knowledge about what works to improve literacy outcomes for students in Haiti and other fragile contexts.

The authors conducted a small-scale randomized control trial (n = 31 teachers) of Online Content-Focused Coaching, an intervention consisting of an online workshop followed by multiple cycles of remote video-based coaching, to support dialogic text discussions. Findings demonstrate the efficacy of Online Content-Focused Coaching in three different ways. First, the authors’ analyses, after accounting for differential attrition among groups, demonstrate an existence proof for effects of the intervention on both classroom text discussion quality and student achievement. Second, the authors examined and demonstrated an association between the magnitude of changes in discussion quality and the magnitude of achievement gains. Finally, the authors propose and examine evidence to support a theory for how teachers develop adaptive expertise for facilitating dialogic text discussions. Results show that teachers’ use of transitional and some aspirational discussion moves grew from baseline to the end of the workshop, with limited growth in the quality of students’ contributions. Over the coaching phase of the intervention, teachers’ facilitation moves grew substantively, and so did students’ strong contributions. The authors interpret the results to suggest that the workshop was critical for developing teachers’ knowledge of the features of dialogism and that coach-guided reflection was essential for developing teachers’ expertise at using facilitation moves to elicit student thinking. Findings contribute to a validity argument for the efficacy of Online Content-Focused Coaching. More importantly, investigating and describing the process of teaching change is the study’s main theoretical contribution.

We situate education, and the science of reading (SOR) specifically, in the midst of a broad, evidence-based revolution involving an array of disciplines focused on improving the health and well-being of individuals and populations. Low and stagnant levels of reading proficiency, massive reading disparities, and a robust SOR knowledge base suggest that the withholding of evidence-based practices in schools differentially harms students of Color, students from poor families, English learners, and students with disabilities. We acknowledge that simply expecting greater use of evidence-based reading practices in schools will not suffice. We present a framework where practitioners and policymakers would continue to gain better and easier access to the SOR knowledge base and evidence-based reading practices and where much greater emphasis would be placed on fueling the demand for evidence-based practices in schools. How schools are organized to provide reading instruction for students is also a key consideration in efforts to expand the use of evidence-based practices. We make the case that schools engaged in comprehensive use of multi-tiered systems of support approaches in reading are well positioned to increase their use of evidencebased reading practices. Because much is not known about how to scale the use of effective practices, scaling efforts themselves represent opportunities to generate new SOR knowledge on both the supply and demand sides. This work would be consistent with the SOR knowledge base as a dynamic and constantly emerging phenomenon, rather than a static repository waiting to be accessed and used.