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 daily interactive vocabulary instruction in their intact special education English/language arts classes. Three schools were assigned randomly to treatment (two schools) or control conditions (one school, 52 students total). We developed instructional routines to introduce four new words per week in three 4-week units to test for replicability. ANCOVAs (with each cycle’s pretest and intelligence quotient as covariates) were conducted on taught vocabulary, all of which favored the treatment condition with effect sizes ranging .6 to .7 per cycle. Near-transfer effects to vocabulary usage were weaker, with significant effects in the last two cycles. Effects were similar for students with disabilities who were ELLs and native English speakers. Treated students maintained their knowledge of words 4 to 24 weeks following the close of treatment.

Preventative and intensive reading intervention can be administered to at‐risk students in a systematic way to help facilitate gains on literacy outcomes. Despite this fact, there are clear barriers to implementation. One solution may be to use paraprofessionals to provide supplemental reading instruction. This study employed meta‐analytic procedures to address two questions: (a) what is the overall effectiveness of paraprofessionals as implementers of reading interventions? and (b) in which areas are paraprofessionals most effective? A literature search of research from 2001 to 2017 yielded 76 studies. Nine studies meeting a priori inclusion criteria were coded for demographic information and six common reading outcomes. The mean ES across outcomes was 0.55, and spelling and decoding emerged as areas to inform future research. Although these meta‐analytic findings must be interpreted with caution due to issues of sample size and heterogeneity of variance, involving paraprofessionals as reading interventionists appears to be a highly promising strategy.

The authors were members of the first group of medical students to participate in a newly modified third-year surgery clerkship at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. The primary teaching methodology of this clerkship is problem-based learning (PBL). In this type of learning experience, students work with paper cases as though they were actual patients, using a method similar to that which they will later use as residents or practising physicians. The students make the decisions themselves, formulating differential diagnoses, eliciting relevant items from a history and physical examination, proceeding with a diagnostic work-up, and creating a treatment plan. This problem-based method increases students' use of resources, improves their retention of information, and helps them develop time management skills. Although the students believe that the clerkship as a whole should offer more opportunities for hands-on experience, they found the PBL component of the clerkship highly motivating, intellectually stimulating, and experimentally satisfying.

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 words significantly better than the students in business-as-usual (BAU) control classes. In the current study, we report the second year results, as the sixth grade students entered seventh grade. Students ( n = 42) in treatment classes again learned 48 new vocabulary words significantly better than similar students in BAU ( n = 21) special education classes. In seventh grade, students also outperformed BAU students on maintenance of these age-appropriate words ( p < .001) and on a standardized measure of vocabulary ( p = .04).

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