University of Tennessee

Students with or at risk for reading disabilities in Grades 6-8 need both literacy intervention and support for learning in the text-based content areas of science and social studies. However, middle schools struggle to offer intervention time during the day, and typically expose students to less complex text than is expected for achieving grade-level performance. Therefore, the research team will create a semester-long Tier 2 intervention, Varied Practice Reading (VPR), based on statistical...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficacy of the Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) professional development (PD) program for improving the knowledge and instructional practices of teachers and the writing and language outcomes for students in third through sixth grade who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH). The language experiences of children who are D/HH are extremely diverse and directly influence their writing. There is a need to identify effective progr...

Students who are deaf or hard of hearing have demonstrated little progress in literacy over the years. It is common for students who are deaf or hard of hearing to graduate high school writing and reading at an elementary level. Deaf or hard of hearing students may exhibit substantial difficulties with sentence-level writing skills, and their writing can have fewer words, more incomplete sentences, frequently omitted function words, and less complex structures compared to the writing of peer...

Learning to read requires the integration of several critical oral language and written language skills, yet there is little known about the types of instruction that would adequately support growth across these domains. In this project, researchers are building on a kindergarten and first grade vocabulary curriculum developed with IES support (the Building Vocabulary for Emerging Readers [BVER] curriculum) by integrating comprehension instruction into the existing vocabulary lessons, expand...