The importance of number sense to mathematics achievement in first and third grades

Children's symbolic number sense was examined at the beginning of first grade with a short screen of competencies related to counting, number knowledge, and arithmetic operations. Conventional mathematics achievement was then assessed at the end of both first and third grades. Controlling for age and cognitive abilities (i.e., language, spatial, and memory), number sense made a unique and meaningful contribution to the variance in mathematics achievement at both first and third grades. Furthermore, the strength of the predictions did not weaken over time. Number sense was most strongly related to the ability to solve applied mathematics problems presented in various contexts. The number sense screen taps important intermediate skills that should be considered in the development of early mathematics assessments and interventions.     

The Effects of an Intensive Reading Intervention for Ninth Graders with very Low Reading Comprehension

This experimental study examined the efficacy of a multicomponent reading intervention compared to a control condition on the reading comprehension of adolescent students with low reading comprehension (more than 1½ standard deviations below normative sample). Ninth‐grade students were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 25) and comparison (n = 19). Reading teachers provided instruction for 90‐min, five times every two weeks for approximately 80 sessions. Treatment effects for each outcome measure were estimated using repeated measure of analysis of covariance for measures of reading comprehension and fluency. Results indicate no statistically significant differences between treatment and comparison conditions. Repeated‐measures analyses of variance between students with lower and higher decoding skills indicated a statistically significant interaction between treatment condition and decoding ability on the WJ‐III PC and Bridge‐IT, with large effect sizes (η_p² .16 and .12, respectively), indicating that treatment was differentially beneficial for students with higher decoding skills.