Neena’s Top Reading Research Picks for October 2025

Welcome to the Reading Research Recap!

I am Dr. Neena Saha, Research Advisor at MetaMetrics. My focus is bridging the research-practice gap so that you can access useful resources that support reading success, expand awareness of the latest reading research, and inform your teaching and learning strategies. This monthly compendium offers the most relevant and must-read research impacting the reading and learning landscape, including easy-to-view, digestible highlights. We want the data and findings to be as useful to you as possible, so please do connect with me with any ideas and comments for next month. Enjoy the latest Reading Research Recap!

Deep Dive: Evidence-Based Interventions and Structured Adaptations

Hi everyone! 

There’s a lot of discussion in structured literacy circles about fidelity, or the degree to which an intervention or program is implemented in the way it was designed. But many interventions are created under idealized conditions which often do not reflect the variation found in classrooms. 

So, how can teachers implement evidence-aligned interventions while still addressing their unique student needs? It is a great question that is answered in the paper I chose for this month: Asset-Based Implementation of Structured Adaptations in an Online Third-Grade Content Literacy Intervention. 

The TL;DR: allowing teachers to participate in team-based learning activities and use their professional judgement to make structured adaptations led to increased student engagement, better student outcomes, and higher fidelity 

Rationale

The researchers wanted to know how structured adaptations would influence student engagement and learning outcomes as well as implementation fidelity in teachers.

Methods

Schools were randomly assigned to either Core Treatment or Adaptive Treatment. 

Sample

• The sample consisted of 95 third-grade teachers and 1,914 students across 26 elementary schools in an urban southeastern district. 

Intervention

• Both conditions implemented the MORE intervention, which is a content literacy intervention. You can learn more about MORE in a previous reading research recap here or from their website here. 
• Only the teachers in the adaptive Treatment Condition participated in Team-­ Based Learning (TBL) sessions and were allowed to customize aspects like strategies used and pacing to meet student needs.

Results

The Adaptive Treatment condition outperformed the Core Treatment condition on certain student engagement measures, teacher implementation measures, and student learning outcome measures, including science background knowledge, and science content reading comprehension (near-transfer passages). 

There were several other measures where there was no significant difference between the two conditions, but it is important to remember that the comparison group was the MORE intervention without structured adaptations, not a “business as usual” condition. So, this can be interpreted that allowing teachers to implement structured adaptations was not harmful, and oftentimes better for many outcome measures. 

Practical implications

Structured Adaptations are beneficial! Here’s a great quote from the conclusion of the paper:

“There is emerging evidence that structured adaptations can enhance program effectiveness (e.g., Kim et al. 2017; Lemons et al. 2014; Neuman et al. 2021), particularly amidst diverse challenges. When supported by researchers and aligned with core principles, these adaptations maintain fidelity while increasing student engagement and learning outcomes by addressing unique student and local context needs. For policymakers and educational leaders, our findings advocate for policies that support adaptive frameworks.” 

Additional Research of Interest

Professional development, commentary, policy, etc.

• Unpacking the Influence of Teachers’ Reading Instruction Strategies on Primary School Students’ Reading Achievement: Evidence From PIRLS 2021
• Follow the Word Gap: The Social Life of a Deficit Concept
• Required Reading: State Intervention in Classroom Early Literacy Instruction (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
• The science of reading meets the science of learning: memory systems, structured literacy, and the role of AI
• The Role of Sleep in Language Knowledge
• K-6 Students’ Reading Beliefs and Practices

Foundational skills

• Spell With Me-K: A Spelling Scaffolding Intervention Using a System of Least Prompts on Kindergarten Spelling Development (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
• Do Faster Learners Know More? How the Learning of Orthographic Regularities Affects Reading in German Primary School Children
• Early outcomes of a structured literacy implementation across a school system: the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn Catalyst program
• The contributions of individual oral language skills to kindergarten students’ reading comprehension
• A Critical Examination of Language and Literacy Profiles of Rural Latiné Students
• Assessing the Impact of a Heritage Language Intervention in Preschool: A Controlled Trial with Dual Language Learners from Immigrant Families
• Development and Validation of a Questionnaire on Multisyllabic Decoding and Encoding With Upper Elementary Learners
• Ready, Set for Variability, Read!

Dyslexia, Learning Disabilities, Struggling Readers, Etc.

• Examining the predictive accuracy and stability of the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen
• Assessing the impact of dyslexia laws on identification and reading achievement: an empirical analysis
• Oklahoma Reading Specialists’ Experience Implementing Dyslexia Intervention Under HB 2804 (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
• Higher Short- and Long-Term Fluent Reading Abilities Following an Executive Functions-Based Reading Intervention Are Moderated by Executive Functions Improvement in Children With Reading Difficulties (Open Access)
• Is There a Dissociation Between Deficit Subtypes in Word Reading and/or Spelling? A Longitudinal Study From Grade 1 to Grade 4 Across Orthographies
• Temporal Characteristics of Handwriting in Children With Dyslexia in Transparent Orthography
• Dissociation Between Attention and Phonological Processing in Developmental Dyslexia: New Evidence from Italian
• A Statistical Learning-Based Clustering Model With Features Selection to Identify Dyslexia in School-Aged Children
• A Statistical Learning-Based Clustering Model With Features Selection to Identify Dyslexia in School-Aged Children (Open Access)

Fluency

• Elementary Students Prefer Extra Reading Practice Before Reading in Front of Peers (Open Access)
• Stealth assessment of oral reading fluency during interactive book reading
• Further evidence for the reliability and validity of a curriculum-based measure of oral reading fluency
• Robotic reading companions can mitigate oral reading anxiety in children

Reading comprehension

• Individual differences in learning from digital texts: What do we know and where do we go from here?
• Charting the Shift: Age as a Moderator of the Genetic and Environmental Influences on Reading
• Supporting English Language Learners’ Literacy Development Through Afterschool Virtual Instruction
• Exploring Intensity in Reading Interventions for Upper Elementary Students
• Rosetta: A Method for Integration of Genetically Informative Studies of Reading Comprehension Development
• Elementary Students’ Reading Growth Trajectories With and Without a Summer Testing Point in the Model
• An Example of Digital Transformation in Reading Instruction: The Effect of Online Paired Reading on Fourth Graders’ Reading Outcomes