Texas Tribune reporter Sanya Monsoon interviewed SMU education expert Stephanie Al Otaiba Professor of Teaching and Learning in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, for a Q&A about early language acquisition in children.
Reading skills improve very little when schools follow the current standard practice of waiting for struggling readers to fail first before providing them with additional help, say researchers at SMU.
The new study found that a dynamic intervention in which struggling readers received the most intensive help immediately, enabled students to significantly outperform their peers who had to wait for additional help.
The findings of a pioneering four-year educational study offer hope for thousands of children identified with intellectual disability or low IQ who have very little, if any, reading ability.
The study by researchers at Southern Methodist University is the first large-scale longitudinal study of its kind to demonstrate the reading potential of students with intellectual disability or low IQ. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Students who consistently receive individualized reading instruction from first through third grade become better readers than those who don’t, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
These findings come after a three-year study that followed several hundred Floridian students, who received varying amounts of individualized instruction, from first to third grade.