Kristen Beach

University of North Carolina at Charlotte | UNC Charlotte · Department of Special Education and Child Development

Although research related to the Science of Reading has documented the positive effects of explicit, systematic reading instruction for all students, students from historically marginalized groups often experience differential opportunities to learn and are likely to perform lower than their peers on large scale measures of reading achievement. The...

The aim of this teaching tip is to share four key takeaways from virtual implementation of a reading intervention in a four‐week summer reading camp (SRC) for rising second‐ and third‐grade students in need of foundational skills support. The SRC, which was a partnership between a university and school district, pivoted to a virtual format for summ...

This exploratory investigation examined the transformation of a traditional summer reading intervention (SRI) to synchronous virtual format in response to school closures due to COVID-19. Goals were to adapt and describe the adaptation of the in-person intervention to the virtual environment, examine program outcomes, and understand tutor and careg...

In this case study, we explored how one college of education went about revising curricula across several programs; thereby disentangling multiple perspectives in order to address the needs of various external drivers as well as meeting faculty-driven needs. Informed by a conceptual framework undergirded by sociocultural theory and co/sense-making,...

Few studies have considered academic vocabulary interventions for students who have learning disabilities (LD) and also are English Learners (EL). This research explored the effects of the third year of the Creating Habits that Accelerate Academic Language of Students (CHAAOS) vocabulary intervention for eighth-grade students who received English L...

In this multi-year study, we taught English/Language Arts teachers of students with learning disabilities in middle school to incorporate 15 min of daily vocabulary activities with students in their intact special education English/Language Arts classes. During Year 1, teachers taught 48 words to their sixth grade students, who learned and retained...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of 42 hr of reading instruction during summer on (a) reading performance of rising second and third graders (n = 39), who were from low-income families and who read below grade level, and (b) the fall reading outcomes between this group and their nonparticipating peers. The intervention was based...

Adolescents with disabilities have great difficulty with academic content in middle school, and their teachers have difficulty teaching them to understand and use academic language. We taught teachers of sixth-grade students with learning disabilities, more than half of whom were also English language learners (ELLs), to implement about 15 min of d...

Student motivation is a necessary catalyst for reading achievement; therefore, educators need to determine how to motivate reluctant readers, including students reading below grade level. Our qualitative study begins to address this challenge by reporting what struggling adolescents and their teacher at 1 urban middle school discussed about their m...

We evaluated the effects of a summer reading intervention with a sample of low-income Black and Hispanic students who were struggling readers. In the summer before their 2nd- or 3rd-grade school year, 14 rising 2nd graders and 18 rising 3rd graders received 15 hr of a scripted, explicit phonics-based program in dyads from credentialed elementary sc...

Helping struggling readers to learn history content in middle school can be difficult due to heavy reading demands. In this study, researchers taught poor readers with and without disabilities in eighth grade to generate main idea statements; create, compare, and contrast paragraphs; and identify cause and effect relations, along with relevant mult...

This research replicates an earlier study and extends it by shifting instructional responsibility from researchers to special education teachers, who implemented reading instruction that included multisyllabic word decoding, academic vocabulary, and three comprehension strategies (generating main ideas, comparing and contrasting people and events,...

This chapter considers training institutions as key points of leverage using special education as a focus. Research universities in diverse communities have a unique opportunity to train future research faculty to collaborate with school district partners to identify problems and areas of need, to conduct research that is of value locally as well a...

We tested the effects of teaching reading skills through U.S. history content for 38 eighth-grade poor readers whose reading ability ranged from second- to fourth-grade levels. Half of the students received special education services, and half of the students were English language learners. Students were taught to decode multisyllabic words, learn...

This 4-year longitudinal research was designed to study special education determinations of students who participated in Tier 2 intervention in a Response to Intervention (RtI) model focused on reading across Grades 1–4. We compared identification rates for learning disabilities (LD) and student characteristics of 381 students the year prior to imp...

We explored the usefulness of first and second grade reading measures and responsiveness criteria collected within a response-to-intervention (RtI) framework for predicting reading disability (RD) in third grade. We used existing data from 387 linguistically diverse students who had participated in a longitudinal RtI study. Model-based predictors o...

In this study, we tested the outcomes of access to a response to intervention (RtI) model in kindergarten or in first grade on end-of-Grade-2 reading achievement and placement in special education. Across five schools, 214 students who began having access to Tier 2 intervention in kindergarten or first grade were compared in Grades 1 and 2 with 208...