Jackie Eunjung Relyea

North Carolina State University | NCSU · Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Counselor Education

In a randomized trial that collects text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require that each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by human raters. An impact analysis can then be conducted to compare treatment and control groups, using the hand-coded scores as a measured outcome. This process...

The purpose of the study was to explore the extent of first-grade children’s academic vocabulary usage in writing. We additionally investigated the extent to which children who used more academic words tended to write compositions that reflected more phonologically and orthographically unique words and/or words with greater semantic challenge. The...

This study examined the role of parents’ early home language use in the English reading development of emergent bilinguals (N = 3,058) and how their relations are moderated by children's oral English language proficiency using longitudinal data from kindergarten to eighth grade (ages 6–15 years). Results from multi-group latent basis growth models...

This study investigated the effect of a four-week socioscientific issues (SSI)-based intervention on sixth-grade students’ argumentative writing and transferability of argument skills across topics. Students in three treatment classrooms engaged in an SSI unit on space exploration while students in three comparable classrooms continued regular spac...

The current study aimed to explore the COVID-19 impact on reading achievement growth by Grade 3–5 students in a large urban school district in the U.S. and whether the impact differed by students’ demographic characteristics and instructional modality. Specifically, using administrative data from the school district, we investigated to what extent...

The current study aimed to investigate whether exposure to spellings would boost memory of meanings and spellings of morphologically complex words, and when spellings are present, whether drawing attention to the morphology of derivative words would activate morphological analysis and therefore enhance word learning. Participants were 36 fourth and...

Although the important role of children’s executive function (EF) in their reading development has been well-established, less is known about the extent to which multilingual children’s EF components vary and whether the variability in different EF abilities explains multilingual children’s English reading achievement. The present study explored th...

In this article, the authors introduce ways to use disciplinary literacy instructional strategies to foster civic engagement and reasoning for middle-grade multilingual students. Four phases of disciplinary literacy strategies--framing, reading, discussion, and writing--are illustrated with examples from an intervention project with sixth-grade mul...

We developed a sustained content literacy intervention that emphasized building domain and topic knowledge from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and evaluated transfer effects on students’ reading comprehension outcomes. The Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) intervention emphasizes thematic lessons that provide an intellectual framework for helping students con...

Given the growing evidence of academic language demands embodied in science practices, this study aimed to design and evaluate the effectiveness of a literacy-science integrated program that emphasized the incorporation of academic vocabulary instruction and collaborative discussion of a socio-scientific issue in sixth-grade science classrooms in a...

The purpose of the study was to assess the volume of academic vocabulary in elementary grades disciplinary textbooks. Academic vocabulary was examined in a corpus of best-selling elementary grades textbooks in three disciplinary areas-science, mathematics, and social studies. Academic words in texts were determined through automated procedures invo...

This study examined the extent to which student perceptions of classroom openness and personal characteristics were associated with civic engagement. Survey data including student perceptions of classroom openness, which indicates perceived levels of social and political discussions in the classroom, and personal characteristics such as gender, sci...

Much of the early research on teachers’ knowledge for reading instruction used instruments that primarily emphasized code‐based aspects of reading, unintentionally signaling that meaning‐focused knowledge is not essential for teaching foundational reading to elementary‐age children. In this study, we developed the Knowledge for Enhancing Reading De...

The purpose of the present study was to examine possible shifts in the presence of academic vocabulary across the past six decades for a continually best-selling first-grade core reading program. Seven program years dating from 1962 to 2013 were examined. Four categories of academic vocabulary (science, mathematics, social studies, and general acad...

This experimental study aimed to replicate and extend a previous efficacy study of an elementary grade content literacy intervention that demonstrated positive effects on students’ vocabulary knowledge depth, argumentative writing, and reading comprehension. Using a cluster (school) randomized trial design, this replication experiment was conducted...

Over the course of a year, student authors in the Juntos NC Writing Project participated in the Literary and Community Initiative to write, publish, and share their lived experiences and identities as Latinx immigrants and first‐generation high school students in North Carolina. Throughout the publication process of their collaborative bilingual bo...

The primary purposes of this article are to explain the importance of academic vocabulary network exposure for children’s disciplinary learning and to describe how teachers can use networks during instruction to support students’ academic vocabulary and content area learning. A second purpose is to propose that core disciplinary textbooks contain “...

This study investigated the effectiveness of the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE), a content literacy intervention, on first graders’ science domain knowledge, reading engagement, and reading comprehension. The MORE intervention emphasizes the role of domain knowledge and reading engagement in supporting reading comprehension. MORE lessons includ...

This study examined the extent to which kindergarten Spanish reading affected English reading growth trajec-tories through fourth grade among nationally representative Spanish-speaking bilingual students (N = 312) in the United States and whether the association varied by students' English oral proficiency. Multilevel growth curve analyses revealed...

Academic vocabulary networks were examined in three elementary grades textbook programs (first through fifth grade) in three domains—science, mathematics, and social studies. Within each program, a given network consisted of a focal domain-specific academic word and the collection of words from all grades that overlapped in meaning with the focal w...

The present study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 to examine whether the relationship between first-grade word-reading and reading-comprehension growth through eighth grade was different for language-minority learners (LMs) versus native English-speaking students (NEs). Among high word readers,...

In the DISCUSS (Dialogic Inquiry for Socioscientific and Conceptual Understanding in School Science) research project, a Socioscientific Issues (551)-based curriculum is developed and implemented in sixth-grade science classrooms with predominantly English language learners (ELLs) in Houston, Texas. A four-week space unit is designed in collaborati...

In the DISCUSS (Dialogic Inquiry for Socioscientific and Conceptual Understanding in School Science) research project, a Socioscientific Issues (SSI)-based curriculum is developed and implemented in sixth-grade science classrooms with predominantly English language learners (ELLs) in Houston, Texas. A four-week Space Unit is designed in collaborati...

The purpose of the study was to address possible text-complexity shifts across the past six decades for a continually best-selling first-grade core-reading program. The anthologies of one publisher’s seven first-grade core-reading programs were examined using computer-based analytics, dating from 1962 to 2013. Variables were Overall Text-Complexity...

The present study investigated whether young Latino dual-language learners’ 2-year English reading growth varied over time according to their initial overall oral English ability. We followed 41 Latino children for 2 years. We tested overall oral English at the beginning of the study and administered multiple curriculum-based reading assessments at...

A survey was sent to primary-grade teachers across the United States in an effort to give voice to teachers’ opinions about the important features that contribute to text complexity for young children. The responses to our survey revealed that primary-grade teachers emphasized word decodability, word frequency, pictures, and word meanings, among ot...

The research question was, “What text characteristics do primary teachers think are most important for early grades text complexity?” Teachers from across the United States accomplished a two-part task. First, to stimulate teachers’ thinking about important text characteristics, primary teachers completed an online paired-text comparison task. Whil...

The purpose was to investigate whether first- and second-grade Latino dual-language learners’ two-year English-reading trajectories varied over time according to their oral Spanish ability. Forty-two children who began school in first or second grade were followed into a second year as second or third graders. Students’ English-reading was measured...