In early 2026, a small group of first-grade students at Lucy Wortham James Elementary School in St. James, Missouri, sat together sounding out words. Kim Williams, the school’s principal, watched as ...

Mastery of reading requires developing its highly interrelated major component skills: decoding, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. These components are discussed separately below, but they work ...

On April 9, AEI’s Robert Pondiscio hosted a panel on the decoding threshold, a key but little-known indicator for elementary and middle school students’ reading ability. The panel featured a ...

At our Title I high school in Los Angeles, CA–where over 90 percent of students face economic hardship–we are uniquely autonomous from any feeder grade schools, which means we have no influence on ...

Entering a contentious debate over reading, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes that districts base literacy instruction on decades of research known as “the science of reading” as the next step to getting all ...

It’s that time of year again, and I will be alternating between publishing thematic collections of past posts and sharing interviews with authors of recent books I consider important and useful to us ...

K. Dara Hill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

Three key skills—academic language, perspective taking, and complex reasoning—can predict how well a student does with the kind of deep reading comprehension required in secondary school and beyond, ...