Rollanda O'Connor

The purpose of this project is to develop an intervention to improve the academic language of adolescents with disabilities in Grades 6 8. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (2013) indicate that adolescents with disabilities have poor reading comprehension. More research is needed on how to develop the academic language of adolescents with disabilities. This project seeks to fill this gap by developing three sets (one per grade) of a 12-week intervention with vocabu...

Finding time to provide intensive reading instruction for students with disabilities and poor readers is more difficult in secondary schools than in elementary schools. Reading instruction in middle school is often eliminated in favor of tutoring support for passing courses. Educators can be faced with weighing the importance of content acquisition over reading skills for improving academic outcomes for these struggling students. This project will develop an intervention to address this dile...

English-language learners are often inappropriately referred for special education services due to poor English language skills and poor reading skills. Inappropriate referrals needlessly increase special education costs. Response to intervention models for reading instruction have been developed to address this concern. These models hold significant promise for providing high quality instruction to all students, identifying students with disabilities early and reliably, and reducing the num...

Many poor readers struggle with word reading and often exhibit slow, halting, error-laced reading or reading that lacks fluency. Phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, language skill, knowledge, and reading fluency all directly or indirectly contribute to reading comprehension. In this 3-year research project, the researchers intended to implement and evaluate approaches to improving the reading fluency and, by extension, the reading comprehension of struggling readers in grades 2 and 4. ...