Developing Reading Instruction Observation Protocols for Special Education Teachers

Considerable resources have been invested in identifying effective reading instruction methods for students with disabilities. Unfortunately, students are not routinely receiving instruction aligned with these practices, impacting their ability to reach their potential. To improve reading instruction, teachers need to receive observation feedback and evaluations reflecting instructional practices shown to be effective. One way to ensure teachers are provided with feedback consistent with evidence based reading instruction is to develop observation protocols aligned to these practices. This dissertation addresses this problem with three distinct, yet interconnected, articles detailing the development of reading instruction observation protocols designed to provide accurate teacher evaluations and feedback to improve reading instruction for students with disabilities. Each protocol is part of the larger Recognizing Effective Special Education Teachers (RESET) observation system. The first article explains the framework that was applied to develop both the observation system and an explicit instruction observation protocol. The second and third articles describe the development of a comprehension and a decoding instruction observation protocol. Development included a comprehensive review of literature and rigorous testing. Results indicate the explicit instruction, comprehension, and decoding instruction protocols will provide reliable evaluations of a teacher’s ability to implement instruction consistent with practices most effective for students with disabilities. Implications for practice and further research are discussed.

Language’s vanishing act in early literacy education

Current conversations about children’s literacy have focused on the need for more phonics and decoding instruction and have sidelined the importance of children’s language development, argues George Hruby. Language development involves more than the ability to decode written language. The ability to understand the meaning of those words is also important, and poor outcomes on reading assessments are not necessarily evidence of poor decoding skills. Hruby posits that comprehension follows a recursive trajectory that he calls ELIK in which students’ linguistic environment affects their language abilities which affects their intellectual growth, which affects their knowledge. Against this backdrop, a lack of attention to linguistic environment is an issue of equity, with children who grow up in less literacy-rich environments coming into school at a disadvantage.

Word Identification and Adolescent Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Readers

Many deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) high school students graduate with reading abilities that leave them poorly prepared for postsecondary settings. In college, reading ability is an important predictor of graduation rates and level of degree attained, and the postsecondary degree a DHH student completes will affect his or her future earnings, upward mobility, and job satisfaction. Considering how important reading is to a DHH student’s future, this chapter will review the evidence base surrounding the foundational building block of reading, decoding. Researchers suggest that decoding instruction for adolescents should occur not only during language arts classes but also in the content areas (i.e., math, science, and social studies). This chapter reviews successful decoding strategies and suggests decoding strategies that teachers can use to support adolescents in various content-area disciplines. The authors discuss how teachers and parents can make strategic decisions when implementing decoding interventions that have no available evidence base.

Probing the Enactment of Reading Miscues: A Study Examining Reading Fluency

Subsequent to the National Reading Panel’s (2000) report, more researchers have been examining the role that reading fluency plays in the development of a child’s reading skills. This study investigated the efficacy of the National Reading Panel’s research claim that a child learns reading fluency skills mainly through phonics and decoding instruction. Using a methodology to track the source of reading miscues, this paper demonstrates that a student’scultural and semantic knowledge of textvitally influences the development of reading fluency skills. Specifically, the findings suggest that a child culturally enacts reading fluency both through graphophonic and semantic knowledge of words. In the process of cultural enactment, reading fluency embodies a complex interplay between graphophonic understandings and a student’s cultural domains. Lastly, this work theorizes the role that cultural and semantical influences play in the role of a student acquiring reading fluency.

A graphomorphemic approach to identifying and selecting a set of high utility, stable affixes common to the technical vocabulary of science

ABSTRACTAdolescents often learn science vocabulary through reading. This vocabulary is frequently characterized by multisyllabic words derived from Greek and Latin roots. While most adolescents have acquired the decoding skills to read these multisyllabic words, many students, particularly those with disabilities, cannot engage in independent word learning because they lack the skills to decode these multisyllabic words. Graphomorphemic elements of words, including affixes, support effective decoding and can eventually support word learning. This article describes an approach used to identify the most frequently occurring, stable affixes within science words so that they could be used in “big word” decoding instruction. To illustrate the approach, a subset of high frequency science words and a list of high utility, stable affixes are provided.

Exploring the Importance of Reading Programs for Kindergartners with Disabilities in Mainstream Classrooms

This study's purpose was to explore the effectiveness and feasibility of phonological awareness (PA) training with and without a beginning decoding component for kindergartners with disabilities in mainstream classrooms. Nineteen general educators, who taught at least one student with a disability, were assigned randomly within their schools to three groups: control, PA training, or PA training with beginning decoding instruction. Teachers in the two treatment groups conducted the treatments for about 20 weeks. Pre- and posttreatment data were collected on 25 children with disabilities. Statistical analyses indicated that the group of students with special needs participating in PA training with beginning decoding instruction did better than the other two groups. However, many children, including many of those in the most effective treatment, did not improve their reading skills.