Vicky Zygouris-Coe

Preventing a Vocabulary Lag: What Lessons Are Learned From Research

This article discusses why early and sustained vocabulary development is important for listening and reading comprehension development and presents findings from 8 studies implemented with children of mostly low socioeconomic status in settings from day care to first grade. Program interventions were based on learning new vocabulary developed out of storybook read-alouds and not with word-reading approaches. Practitioners and researchers may find it quite useful to implement the vocabulary-learning procedures with low-vocabulary children or English language learners in their own settings. We offer a number of suggestions and implications for future research based on conversational interactions and the findings of the 8 investigations.

A Hybrid Evaluation Model for Evaluating Online Professional Development.

Online professional development is multidimensional. It encompasses: a) an online, web‐based format; b) professional development; and most likely c) specific objectives tailored to and created for the respective online professional development course. Evaluating online professional development is therefore also multidimensional and as such both important and difficult. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the structure of an evaluation model developed and used to evaluate a custom‐built online professional development course, emphasizing how the evaluation model fits within and contributes to better understanding of online professional development evaluation. A hybrid model is conceptualized as one solution to this problem. The conceptualization of the hybrid model is presented in theoretical terms. This is followed by a concise summary of its application to an online professional development course.

Engaging Students With Text: The 3‐2‐1 Strategy

The 3-2-1 strategy helps engage students actively and meaningfully in their reading. First, students summarize important points from text. Second, students share insights about what aspects of passages are most interesting or intriguing to them. Finally, students are given opportunities to ask questions about what they have read.

From the Editorial Team of Literacy Research and Instruction

AbstractThe purpose of the study was to explore the validity of a novel computer-analytic developmental scale, the Writing Ability Developmental Scale. On the whole, collective results supported the validity of the scale. It was sensitive to writing ability differences across grades and sensitive to within-grade variability as compared to human-rated sensitivity. It predicted scores on the human-rated continuous scale very well. As compared to the human-rated continuous scale, it demonstrated similarly constant mean differences across ethnicity and socioeconomic status—although not for all rising grade differences or for gender. There was no genre differential across the two scales, and measurement precision was highly similar for the two scales.