Integrated Middle School Literacy Instruction

Strong literacy skills are crucial to ensuring an individual's future educational and economic success. Existing evidence suggests the transition from elementary to middle school is a decisive period for literacy development. In this paper I investigate the impact of extended learning time in literacy instruction on subsequent cognitive outcomes. I capitalize on the existence of a natural experiment born out of a district's use of an exogenously- determined cutoff in Iowa Test scores in fifth grade to assign students to an additional literacy course in middle school. My findings suggest that exposure to this intervention generates strong negative impacts for black students, and noisy positive impacts for white, Latino, and Asian students. My findings suggest that additional literacy instruction in middle school can have markedly different effects on students, and program differentiation or augmentation may be necessary to prevent harm for students of average literacy ability in fifth grade.

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Middle School Teachers’ Discipline-Specific Use of Gestures and Implications for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction

Journal of Literacy Research ◽

10.1177/1086296x14532615 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 46 (2) ◽

pp. 234-262 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Amy Alexandra Wilson ◽

Michael D. Boatright ◽

Melanie Landon-Hays

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Middle School Teachers ◽

Literacy Instruction ◽

Disciplinary Literacy ◽

School Teachers

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Preparing to Implement Evidence-Based Literacy Practices in the Co-taught Classroom

Intervention in School and Clinic ◽

10.1177/1053451220944369 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 105345122094436

Author(s):

Jade Wexler ◽

Devin M. Kearns ◽

Erin Hogan ◽

Erin Clancy ◽

Alexandra Shelton

Keyword(s):

Middle School ◽

Special Education ◽

Literacy Instruction ◽

Literacy Practices ◽

Content Area Literacy ◽

Fidelity Of Implementation ◽

Content Area ◽

Evidence Based ◽

Instructional Framework ◽

Content Area Instruction

It is essential that middle school content-area and special education co-teachers adopt evidence-based literacy practices that they can integrate into their content-area instruction to address the needs of all of the students in their classes. This article provides co-teachers with four planning tips to improve implementation of the practices they adopt. The planning tips are organized using the acronym FIRST: (a) monitor Fidelity of implementation of the adopted practices, (b) Integrate the practices into daily content-area instruction and across the year, (c) determine the Roles of each co-teacher when planning for and implementing instruction in the adopted practices, and (d) consider specific guidelines to Select Texts for each literacy-focused lesson. The planning tips are illustrated using examples related to the content-area literacy instruction (CALI) instructional framework, which is a set of evidence-based literacy practices and procedures designed to improve the literacy instruction middle school coteachers implement in their content-area classes.

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