The three accuracy ranges for oral reading—easy, instructional level, and hard—are familiar to almost everyone who teaches young students just learning to read. It may come as a surprise to learn, then, that no study has yet been conducted with beginning readers to support our well‐accepted views about accuracy ranges and their role in reading development. What accuracy range is optimal? Does it really matter if a student reads with less than 90% accuracy? In this article, the authors share what they learned when they explored these questions about oral reading accuracy and student progress.

We respond to calls for more research to address whether and how successful professional development (PD) experiences (defined here in terms of student progress) are related to changes in teacher beliefs, specifically about effective literacy instruction for young struggling readers. We developed a measure, a Teacher Belief Score, to identify teacher beliefs present in interview data and we used student achievement data to create two contrasting groups of teachers, those whose students had lower progress and those who had higher. While initially in the fall, lower progress and higher progress teachers differed little in their alignment of beliefs with program features; over time, higher progress teachers trended toward beliefs that were aligned with program features, whereas lower progress teachers trended away. Findings suggest the need for an additional component to Guskey’s model of teacher change: attributing student progress to the new instructional practices learned in PD.

Recent research on scaffolding has examined both the sources of information used and neglected during students' word‐solving attempts and the amount of information provided in teachers' word‐solving prompts. In this teaching tip, the authors expand the application of such research from one‐to‐one student–teacher interactions to a guided reading setting. The authors provide examples to illustrate how teachers can critically evaluate students' word‐solving attempts and consequently respond to the readers' needs within the guided reading context. The dual focus that the authors suggest, making decisions about both the type and amount of information, provides a framework through which teachers can implement scaffolding during their guided reading lessons.

Self-correction can be a powerful mechanism for extending problem solving and literacy achievement. Learn how to use information about self-correcting behavior to guide instruction and support reading development.