Jack Mostow

Vocabulary knowledge is an important component of academic success and impacts skills across academic disciplines. It is a critical component of literacy development. However, the vocabulary skills of high school students in the U.S. are insufficient to meet the demands of college and career. Furthermore, there is very little vocabulary instruction taught in U.S. high schools. The current project will develop a high school vocabulary intervention that builds on the fully developed Dictionary...

Fluency-defined as the ability to read connected text quickly, easily, accurately, and expressively-is one of the most important skills needed to develop successful readers. However, acquiring this skill takes practice and guidance from teachers and many schools lack the resources to give students the individualized practice and attention they need to excel. One possible method for filling this gap is through the use of tutors. While human tutors can be expensive and difficult to find, anoth...

Research indicates that explicit vocabulary instruction benefits students' word learning and comprehension of text. However, major instructional challenges remain, for example, determining how to teach enough words to matter and how to teach them so that they are actually learned and retained. The purpose of this project is to develop, iteratively refine, and evaluate the usability and feasibility of an automated tutorial intervention to help children in grades 2-3 learn vocabulary necessary...

Many students struggle to understand what they read even after they have achieved proficiency in basic reading skills (e.g., decoding, word recognition). Explicit instruction in reading comprehension, especially in the early grades, has been widely neglected in classroom practice, with relatively little research conducted that develops and evaluates instructional approaches for teaching reading comprehension in the primary grades. The purpose of this project is to develop and evaluate an a...