ABSTRACT
I. Wilkinson and colleagues hypothesized that oral reading may be of greater value for struggling readers because it requires an overt response and places greater demands on these often-reluctant students for participation. Research has shown that struggling readers may develop negative reading attitudes, behaviors, and habits without teacher control. A comparison of expert opinion and other reading research reports revealed a substantial consensus about those practices and contexts likely to facilitate learning to read. Educators must first look to the empirical research base to inform decisions and then to the best information available, professional judgment grounded in general research evidence, for practices that do not have an established research base. Teaching each literacy skill one at a time until mastery has been achieved—and withholding the teaching of new literacy skills until then—were also believed to make learning to read more difficult.
