We report on a meta-analysis designed to test the theory that instruction that involves direct teaching of academic vocabulary and teaching strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words develops students’ abilities to infer new words’ meanings and builds students’ overall vocabulary knowledge. We meta-analyzed 39 experimental and quasi-experimental intervention studies conducted in grades K-5 to examine the effects of these instructional approaches. Results indicate that interventions that targeted word meaning instruction do not show overall positive effects on measures of breadth of vocabulary knowledge. Although strategy interventions are effective in improving word solving skills on near transfer measures, strategy interventions do not significantly impact students’ overall breadth of vocabulary knowledge. These findings suggest that direct teaching of vocabulary words may not be effective for building overall vocabulary knowledge among elementary-grade students. More research is needed to examine the potential of teaching strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words.

Digital technologies and the instructional contexts in which they are embedded can increase students’ access to meaningful learning opportunities. Although there is a tradition of designing and integrating digital tools in secondary-grades project-based science instruction to enhance learners’ access to disciplinary learning, the elementary grades have received less attention. This has left classroom teachers with limited guidance for leveraging affordances of digital tools in project-based learning (PBL) with younger learners. In this article, we describe the design and integration of digital tools in Multiple Literacies in Project-based Learning, a recent elementary-grade project-based science curriculum that integrates literacy and mathematics. We use the principles of Universal Design for Learning to characterize the affordances of these digital tools, with attention to how the interplay of the tools and the PBL environment in which they were embedded enhanced access to learning opportunities for all students.

Although research related to the Science of Reading has documented the positive effects of explicit, systematic reading instruction for all students, students from historically marginalized groups often experience differential opportunities to learn and are likely to perform lower than their peers on large scale measures of reading achievement. These differences may be further exacerbated by summer learning loss (SLL), in which student academic progress stagnates or declines during the summer months. Providing summertime academic interventions, specifically in reading, has been one proposed solution for mitigating SLL. The present exploratory study examined the impact of a comprehensive approach to summer literacy intervention that included evidence-based reading instruction in foundational reading skills (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency) and more advanced disciplinary literacy skills on student reading-related outcomes for rising 1st-3rd grade students. on student reading-related outcomes for rising first, second, and third graders from an under-resourced, urban school. The majority of students who participated in the programming were from historically marginalized populations and low-income families and included students with diverse literacy needs. with 70% of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, and included students with diverse literacy skills, students with developmental disabilities, and emergent bilingual learners. Students were assessed pre-post using norm-referenced assessments of phonemic segmentation, nonsense word reading, and oral reading fluency as well as curriculum embedded Mastery Tests. Results indicated that students made significant growth or maintained measured reading skills. Results indicated that rising first grade students made significant growth pre-post on measures of phonemic segmentation fluency, nonsense word reading, and Mastery Tests. Rising 2nd grade students demonstrated significant growth on Mastery Tests measures and maintained on other measures. Rising 3rd grade students demonstrated significant growth on aspects of nonsense word reading and maintained on other measures. Findings from this study indicate that a summer literacy intervention designed to address both foundational and disciplinary literacy skills may improve reading-related outcomes for students from economically and culturally diverse backgrounds.

This research reports on a 3-year project involving the implementation of an intentionally designed year-long clinical experience delivered within a school–university partnership. Research questions focused on the extent the organizational facets of the experience contributed to the development of a community of practice (CoP) and how candidates’ perceptions of their preparation were associated with components of the CoP. Findings demonstrated the importance of candidates building foundational relationships with school personnel and peers and the impact of supported, authentic practice. Implications are discussed as related considerations to deepen partnerships and provide clinical experiences with structured opportunities for relationship building and examinations of practice.

This article provides a review and practice-based examples of three research-supported approaches to vocabulary instruction for students with learning disabilities (LD). In the first half of the article, we introduce and discuss the research bases for semantic, mnemonic, and strategic approaches to vocabulary instruction. Each approach encompasses a range of instructional activities that educators can select depending on relevant words for instruction and their instructional goals. In the last half, we use a middle-grade science passage along with vocabulary words from that passage to demonstrate how semantic, mnemonic, and strategic approaches can be emphasized or combined to promote text comprehension and vocabulary learning for children with LD.

In this conceptual paper, we present a discussion of how we have embraced two challenges, posed by Aukerman and Schuldt, in their call for a more socially just science of reading, to which this special issue is responsive. Specifically, we share lessons learned from years of designing texts that (a) advance knowledge-building in the context of project-based science teaching and (b) advance readers’ textual dexterity. Our research is conducted in the context of project-based learning in science, and we approach our inquiry from multiple theoretical perspectives. We argue for the importance of text in science instruction. We present theories, empirical support, and national standards consistent with the integration of text in science. We discuss the role that texts can play in project-based science instruction. We also illustrate the design and optimization of texts and tasks, as well as the role of the teacher in this instruction.