This study examined the longitudinal factorial invariance and growth trajectories of a Spanish curriculum-based measurement (CBM) of foundational reading skills in kindergarten within a Response to Intervention (RtI) framework. A total of 196 Spanish-speaking kindergarteners were assessed at three time points (fall, winter, and spring) on five CBM tasks targeting phonological awareness, alphabetic knowledge, print concepts, and vocabulary. Longitudinal confirmatory factor analyses supported the factorial stability of the IPAL-EI across the kindergarten year, revealing a coherent latent construct with a stable internal organization and demonstrating configural, metric, and scalar invariance. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed significant linear growth across the school year for most CBM indicators and for an omnibus composite score, with the exception of phonological awareness and written language knowledge–text. At-risk students showed significantly lower initial performance across most measures; however, growth trajectories were largely parallel across groups, with limited evidence of differential slopes over time. Despite overall gains in both groups, performance differences between at-risk students and students not at risk remained relatively stable across the school year. These findings provide empirical support for the longitudinal reliability and developmental responsiveness of Spanish CBM scores, particularly for the composite score, underscoring their utility for universal screening within RtI frameworks in transparent orthographies.
This exploratory study assessed Brazilian teachers’ knowledge of dyslexia, linguistics, and reading instruction methods as well as socioeconomic predictors of their performance. Teachers (N = 214) completed a sociodemographic questionnaire and three instruments assessing knowledge of dyslexia, phonology, and reading instruction. Participants worked in public schools, were predominantly female (98.59
Recent research on eye movements has largely converged on the view that eye guidance during reading is primarily driven by low-level visual features. However, this perspective has been increasingly challenged by findings from agglutinative languages such as Uighur, Finnish, and Mongolian, where high-level linguistic factors—including morphological complexity and word frequency—have been shown to influence fixation location. The present study aimed to test the generalizability of these effects by examining their impact in English. Rather than using suffixed words, we focused on a different morphological structure: compound words. Consistent with previous research, we found that word frequency significantly affected first-fixation location. However, no significant effect of morphological complexity was observed. We discuss implications for theoretical accounts of saccade generation during reading.
This six-month longitudinal study followed 377 third- and fourth-grade students to examine the relationship between executive function and reading comprehension in middle-grade primary school children using variable-centered and person-centered approaches. It examined potential pathways linking executive function and reading comprehension, heterogeneity in executive-function profiles, and longitudinal transitions. Results showed that: (1) executive function was significantly associated with reading comprehension, with significant indirect associations through morphological awareness and the serial pathway of morphological awareness and Chinese character vocabulary size; (2) latent profile analysis identified four executive function profiles: an inhibitory control risk group, an executive function difficulties group, an executive function advantage group, and a weak working memory group. The executive function advantage group showed higher morphological awareness, Chinese character vocabulary size, and reading comprehension, with its reading comprehension advantage associated with an indirect pathway through morphological awareness and, to a lesser extent, a serial pathway through morphological awareness and Chinese character vocabulary size; and (3) latent transition analysis indicated moderate profile stability over time, alongside transitions between profiles. At Time 2, executive function profiles differed in baseline-adjusted levels of morphological awareness, Chinese character vocabulary size, and reading comprehension, whereas significant differences in relative change across profiles were observed only for reading comprehension. These findings suggest that educators should consider children’s executive function profiles when identifying reading-support needs and provide differentiated support incorporating language and literacy skills such as morphological awareness and Chinese character vocabulary size.
This longitudinal study examined how loneliness related to the initial level and growth of reading comprehension in primary school children, and whether word reading and vocabulary mediated this link. Participants were 689 Chinese third graders (49.49
Adolescent students with reading difficulties face compounding challenges in both reading and writing, yet few interventions address both within content-area instruction. This study examined an integrated reading, writing, and knowledge-building intervention using Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) across four curriculum topics with 12 secondary school students with reading difficulties. A clustered concurrent multiple-baseline single-case design evaluated writing outcomes using an adapted 6+1 Trait® Writing Rubric. Visual analysis showed immediate level changes replicated across three staggered clusters, with complete observed non-overlap between phases for most students and outcomes; the pattern of gains nevertheless varied by trait. Findings extend SRSD research to secondary school students with reading difficulties and are consistent with, though do not test, the proposition that writing can index knowledge built through sustained curricular reading.
Important questions exist about the extent to which racial gaps exist in instructional opportunities and achievement outcomes for elementary students in schools implementing multi-tiered systems of support. In the United States, concerns about gaps for Black and White students are of particular concern. Our work illustrates a systematic evaluation of racial differences in instructional opportunities and outcomes of a high impact tutoring program as implemented across 50 high needs schools in a midwestern state. The program provides high impact tutoring to K-3 students with reading difficulties through well-trained community-based tutors. Although this approach is used in schools in more than a dozen states, the extent to which implementation and outcomes are similar for students of different racial backgrounds has not been systematically examined. Using data from the 2022–23 academic year, we compared various indicators of instructional opportunities (e.g., attendance, intervention changes, materials sent home) and outcomes (e.g., spring reading score, program exit, reading growth) for Black or African American and White students matched on grade and fall reading score. Multi-level regression models accounting for school clustering were used to explore whether race was a significant predictor for each of six targeted indicators. Race was found to predict only one of the six indicators: program exit by the end of the academic year. School accounted for considerable variance in all models, suggesting that unique characteristics of one’s school may account for racial differences in implementation and outcomes. Overall, this work illustrates how systematic data collection and analysis can help pinpoint if and where racial opportunity and achievement gaps are evident within tiered programs to help inform decision-making.
The growing research base concerning the role of teachers’ specialized knowledge to teach literacy in supporting students’ reading achievement—and policies based on this research—primarily relies on data from teacher knowledge surveys. We examined the possibility that teachers who respond to knowledge surveys are systematically different from teachers who only partially or do not respond. In this exploratory study, we examined response patterns (complete, partially complete, no response) to teacher knowledge surveys in three U.S.-based projects and explored potential differences among response patterns based on sociodemographic characteristics, teaching beliefs, and classroom/program characteristics. We identified response patterns using missing value analyses and applied the What Works Clearinghouse guidelines for group equivalency. Collectively, these projects represent data from 870 inservice and preservice preschool-Grade 5 teachers. Across datasets, 84
This study investigated the impact of different practice modalities—graphomotor, recitation, and a hybrid combination—on the acquisition of unfamiliar English letters by second-grade Arab Israeli children. One hundred 7- to 8-year-old Arab Israeli second-graders (50 girls) were randomly assigned to a graphomotor group, a recitation group, a hybrid graphomotor–recitation group, or an untrained control group. Foundational letter-level skills (identification, naming, sound knowledge) were assessed pre- and 24–48 h post-intervention, while emergent writing skills (letter copying speed, accuracy, and spelling) were assessed post-intervention.All groups, including the control, showed significant gains in foundational letter skills, with structured interventions producing notably greater improvements. The hybrid group consistently outperformed all other groups in letter identification, naming, sound knowledge, and spelling. For letter copying speed, graphomotor practice—both alone and in the hybrid condition—was superior, while all intervention groups improved copying accuracy compared to the control.These findings strongly support multimodal learning theories, demonstrating that integrating motor and verbal engagement is most effective for building robust grapho-phonemic representations from scratch. This study highlights the significance of active, multisensory instructional strategies for early literacy acquisition in non-native language contexts, particularly when the target script is entirely unfamiliar.
In the French educational context, children learn to read in script but to write in cursive, resulting in dual visual–motor coding that may influence writing habits in adulthood. This study examined how handwriting styles are organized in adults, and how they impact performance at both a motor (writing) and perceptual (reading) levels. The first experiment analyzed the spontaneous production of isolated lowercase letters and text copying. Results revealed that most participants used both script and cursive writing, as well as personalized letter forms, suggesting an adaptive reorganization of handwriting toward greater motor efficiency and visual familiarity. Contrary to general assumptions, cursive handwriting is slower and is more disfluent than script. The second experiment investigated whether script versus cursive styles affect reading performance using eye-tracking measures of total reading time, the number of fixations per word, and the average fixation duration. No significant effect of handwriting style on reading fluency or comprehension was found, suggesting that adult readers maintain stable orthographic representations despite graphic variability. Together, these findings highlight the robustness of the reading–writing system and the interplay between motor optimization and perceptual familiarity. Handwriting emerges as a dynamic and adaptive skill, reflecting both embodied cognitive processes and visual learning. These results have implications for future research into script and cursive usage patterns within French adult handwriting and for educational practices in handwriting and literacy development.
Text difficulty has traditionally been evaluated using objective indices such as readability measures. However, difficulty is also inherently subjective. In this study, we examined how second-language English readers’ subjective judgments of text difficulty were associated with established readability indices. We also explored their relationship with difficulty estimates derived from large language models (LLMs) as a further objective indicator. Additionally, we investigated how these subjective and objective difficulty measures related to eye-movement behavior during reading. The results indicated that subjective ratings were strongly correlated with objective difficulty measures. Bayesian multilevel models further indicated that the LLM-derived estimate and text-level mean subjective difficulty were associated with selected passage-level eye-movement measures, such as total reading time and skipping count. However, model comparisons showed that these text-level predictors provided only limited incremental improvement once participant- and text-level differences were modeled. The clearest incremental information came from reader-specific deviations in subjective difficulty. These findings suggest that objective and subjective difficulty measures are related but not interchangeable. Objective measures are useful for characterizing text-level difficulty, whereas reader-specific subjective ratings provide additional insight into how individual readers experience and process the same text.
This study employed online handwriting tasks to examine two key components of Chinese orthographic knowledge―a repertoire of orthographic units of different grain sizes and the positional consistency of orthographic units―as well as the relationship between character writing and character knowledge. Fifty adult Korean learners of Chinese as a second language (L2) completed two Chinese character copying tasks—one with real characters and one with pseudo-characters—and a character naming task. Analyses of inter-stroke intervals (ISIs) in the real character copying task revealed a significant boundary effect, with longer pauses occurring between orthographic units than within them, indicating L2 learners’ tendency to chunk characters into functional units during writing. Shorter ISIs for phonetically regular characters demonstrated the potential influence of phonetic regularity on handwriting. Notably, participants showed higher accuracy when copying pseudo-characters containing components with high positional consistency after controlling for HSK levels. Error analyses further evidenced that their copying was modulated by the positional consistency of orthographic units. Overall, these findings suggest that multiple domains of orthographic knowledge, including awareness of unit grain sizes and their positional consistency, are important for L2 Chinese learning.
We present the findings of two studies that examine linguistic knowledge and self-efficacy across two professional development experiences for English-language reading instructors. In the first study, school professionals (N = 398) attended a five-day, in-person intervention training and tutored a striving reader. Scores on a linguistic knowledge assessment were significantly higher at post-test than at pre-test (t(823) = − 4.94, p < 0.001; d = 0.35). Notably, educators’ confidence in their abilities to teach phonemic awareness and phonics significantly decreased (t(821) = 7.44, p < 0.001; d = 0.52). In the second study, education majors and university interns (N = 860) completed an online, asynchronous 10-hour version of the training before tutoring. Again, mean scores on participants’ linguistic knowledge survey were higher at post-test than pretest (M = 11.52, SD = 3.04; M = 11.04, SD = 2.73 respectively), though in this case, participants’ confidence in their abilities to teach phonemic awareness and phonics increased (t(266) = 11.22, p < 0.001). Pretest score was the only significant predictor of post-test score; neither participant status (paid vs. course-embedded) nor major (education vs. other) significantly predicted post-test scores. We discuss implications for teacher professional development and echo calls for a standardized measure of teacher knowledge for literacy instruction (Georgiou et al., 2026; Parrila et al., 2024; Trezek Zepp, 2025). Keywords: literacy, tutoring, linguistic knowledge, self-efficacy for literacy instruction
Teacher perceptions have been conceptualized as a critical interpersonal mechanism mediating the effects of classroom interactions on student learning. However, several questions remain regarding the differential impact of ability and engagement perceptions, how their association with reading achievement unfolds, and whether they differ between distinct teacher groups, particularly within the context of intervention programs. This study examined how classroom- and support-teacher perceptions were associated with reading speed, the distinctiveness of ability and engagement perceptions, and differences between classroom and support teachers. Two hundred and eighty second-grade students with reading difficulties enrolled in the A to Z intervention program were followed across one school year using longitudinal cross-lagged models. Classroom teachers rated students’ reading ability and engagement, while support teachers rated their engagement. For classroom teachers, the results revealed reciprocal links: reading speed predicted perceptions of reading ability and engagement, and perceptions of ability in turn predicted subsequent reading speed. The results also showed reciprocal associations for support teachers. However, these were less stable and more context-dependent. Reading speed predicted engagement perceptions only early in the year, whereas engagement perceptions predicted later reading speed. These findings highlight teacher perceptions as responsive to and predictive of students’ reading speed, with distinct patterns according to the teacher role and instructional context.
This study examined how Chinese JFL (Japanese as a Foreign Language) learners perceived and used Japanese emotional adjectives, focusing on subject restrictions and the role of inference markers. In Japanese, emotional adjectives are typically restricted to first-person subjects, while third-person expressions require inference markers such as -sō or rasii to indicate indirect emotional inference. To investigate this, we compared the acceptability judgments of 48 native Japanese speakers and 67 Chinese JFL learners across different proficiency levels, analyzing how learners adapted to these linguistic constraints. The results (see Fig. 1) indicate that Chinese learners were more likely to reject third-person emotional expressions without inference markers, adhering more strictly to traditional Japanese norms compared to native speakers. As proficiency increased (see Fig. 2), learners gradually developed a more refined understanding of subject restrictions and inference markers. Nevertheless, even among high-proficiency Chinese JFL learners, judgments of third-person emotional adjective sentences remained more conservative than those of first-person sentences, with ratings generally narrow ranging between − 1 (‘rather unnatural’) to + 1 (‘rather natural’). Additionally, the study highlights the influence of contemporary Japanese usage, where younger native speakers would exhibit greater acceptance of third-person emotional expressions without inference markers. This evolving linguistic trend appears to shape Chinese JFL learners’ adaptability, influencing how they navigate both formal and informal contexts in Japanese. These findings emphasize the importance of targeted instruction and exposure to diverse language input in facilitating learners’ acquisition of Japanese emotional expressions.
Effective reading instruction requires that teachers make the linguistic features of school-based texts both visible and accessible to students, yet preservice teachers’ (PSTs) knowledge about this language (KAL) is rarely assessed with instruments that capture the full linguistic continuum and provide validity evidence for score interpretation. This study developed and validated a multiple-choice measure of elementary preservice teachers’ KAL for teaching reading across phonology/orthography, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Items were developed through iterative evidence-centered design procedures, including expert review and cognitive interviews to support content- and response-process validity evidence. Internal structure evidence was examined with a one-factor confirmatory factor analysis (WLSMV) and Rasch modeling. The one-factor CFA demonstrated good fit, χ2(189) = 200.44, p = .271, RMSEA = 0.021 (90
Studies conducted in recent years have confirmed the importance of phonological awareness as one of the most robust predictors of early reading. However, alongside this knowledge, there is no work that has focused on analyzing how to maximize its effects on the literacy process. It is known that certain cognitive skills, particularly executive functions, exert a decisive influence on school learning and, especially, on reading. However, there is no work focused on understanding the combined impact of both skills on early reading. Hence the objective of this study, which aims to analyze the potential that combined instruction in phonological awareness and executive functions can have on early reading learning. A quasi-experimental design was used, comparing groups with pretest and posttest measures. The study included 386 students between the ages of 6 and 8. The results indicate that the joint stimulation of phonological awareness and certain executive functions, such as working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, promotes improved reading learning. Therefore, their integration into classroom practices is suggested, while creating new avenues to strengthen the cognitive and linguistic foundations of early literacy development.
This study examines early literacy among Awajún Indigenous children in the Peruvian Amazon and interprets achievement patterns in relation to the educational conditions through which learning opportunities are made available in intercultural bilingual education settings. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, we assessed 1443 first- and second-grade students from 71 EIB primary schools with an Awajún-language literacy assessment that captured emergent writing, phonological awareness, and reading comprehension. Quantitative findings reveal uneven cross-grade profiles: alphabetic writing is not widespread in either grade, phonological awareness remains fragile, and literal and inferential comprehension show limited differentiation between cohorts. To contextualize these patterns, qualitative evidence from classroom observations, field notes, open-ended survey responses, semi-structured interviews with educational specialists, and a participatory workshop with teachers documented a set of recurring conditions that help contextualize restricted opportunities to learn: multigrade organization, teacher turnover, uneven preparation for teaching literacy in Awajún, scarcity of culturally and linguistically appropriate materials, limited infrastructure, and classroom routines centered on copying and tracing rather than meaningful writing and comprehension-oriented reading. The study contributes situated evidence on early literacy profiles in Awajún EIB schools and identifies actionable priorities for strengthening early-grade literacy through sustained instruction in the mother tongue, systematic phonological and writing practices, stable pedagogical support, and improved access to relevant materials.
The application of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly prevalent in the education context. Many empirical studies have investigated the impact of AI on students’ writing performance. However, the results of these existing studies are inconsistent. At present, most reviews or meta-analyses focus on automatic writing assessment tools, while there are relatively few meta-analyses on the application of AI in writing. This study aims to perform a meta-analysis to determine the effect of AI on writing performance and to determine the factors that moderate this effect. The meta-analysis included 46 empirical studies published between January 2000 and September 2025. Pooled analysis via a random-effects model revealed that AI had a medium-sized effect on students’ writing performance, with Hedges’ g of 0.601 (95
