They noted previous studies that demonstrated the growing gap in reading levels between low-income and middle-income students, particularly in the 1st to the 5th grades, with over half of the decline coming about during the summer months. They divided their study into four groups: a control group that received no books over the summer; a group that was simply given eight books to read; a third group given eight books plus fluency lessons before the end of the school year; and the fourth group given fluency and comprehension lessons prior to summer vacation -- with the latter making the greatest gains in reading levels (Kim and White 2011)
Both the boys and the girls took the same reading course that emphasized phonetics, making inferences, using background knowledge to make connections, repeated oral reading, and comprehension and vocabulary instruction. Since the girls improved more significantly than the boys from the pre- to the posttest, this strongly indicates that a one-size-fits-all type on instruction that takes no account of gender differences will be less than optimally effective (Prado and Plourde 2009)
Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) practice for 15-20 minutes every day was often touted as a way to increase student interest in reading, but the results to date have been disappointing. Their study of 362 Chinese students in Hong Kong found that SSR was more effective in the group of High Value Readers and with those who had more parental contact and involvement in their reading activities (Siah and Kwak 2010)
The peer review process is critical to ensuring reliability in academic research. Not only does peer review help ensure reliability, but it also encourages better work from authors and raises expectations of work found in scholarly journals (Ware, 2008)
Paraphrasing helps students realize that comprehension is the goal of reading." (Sharon, 2009 p 73)
¶ … grants work increase one's chances of receiving grants? No definite answer can be given on that. Funding services linked to school is one complicated issue everyone has been avoiding to talk about (Chavkin, 1997)
2) For School Improvement Grants to be awarded to LEAs, in line with ESEA section 1003(g)(6), a licensed SEA is required to name schools' three tiers, in line with the prerequisite in the first paragraph, to help the SEA choose only the LEAs that have the most severe need for funding. From the chosen LEAs who have the most needs, the SEA is required to choose, in line with the second paragraph, the LEAs whose commitment seems strong enough for the right use of the funds to make adequate resources available, making sure the schools with the least achievements meet all the requirements for accountability in this context (White and Murphy, 2010)
Even with that being the case, it is deemed that psychology in particular is probably the best sociological paradigm when it comes to staying true to the just-mentioned evidence-based practice and similar facets of scholarly study. The commonly cited reason for this good performance with psychology is that it has a strong base of positivism and thus helps follow the required medical model (Guest & Zijlstra, 2012)