Accommodation: A shift or change in the ongoing method of instruction in order to facilitate student success.

Aphasia: The inability to comprehend or produce spoken or written language.

Assessment: The process of gathering information to help an individual make decisions. In education, the information gathered should help a teacher make decisions about appropriate instructional goals, objectives, teaching methods, curriculum, and program placement.

Attention deficit disorder (ADD): A disorder characterized by severe and persistent difficulties in one or more of the following areas: attention, impulsivity, and motor behavior. These difficulties can lead to learning and behavior problems at home, school, and work.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): ADD with hyperactivity, or excessive and exaggerated motor activity.

Basal reading series: Published comprehensive classroom reading programs that have daily plans for teaching reading and include stories, comprehension questions, activities, teaching strategies, worksheets, tests, scope and sequence charts of reading skills, etc.

Connected instruction: A way of teaching systematically in which the teacher continually shows and discusses with the students the relationship between what has been learned, what is being learned, and what will be learned.

Continuous assessment: An element of responsive instruction in which the teacher regularly monitors student performance to determine how closely it matches the instructional goal. Ideally, these checks of student performance should occur after as many practice sessions as possible.

Curriculum-based assessment: A type of informal assessment in which the procedures directly assess student performance in learning targeted content in order to make decisions about how to better address a student's instructional needs.

Decoding: Relating a sequence of letters in print to their corresponding sounds, allowing the reader to translate the sequence into a word.

Dyslexia (specific developmental dyslexia): A type of learning disability; under Federal law, a specific language-based disorder characterized by problems in learning to read, write, and spell.

Elaborated feedback: An element of responsive instruction in which the results of student performance on a practice task are shared with the student to help him/her understand what was done correctly and what specific things need to be targeted for improvement during the next practice exercise.

Explicit instruction: Instruction that is fully developed, completely and clearly expressed in detail, and places no burden on the learner to "fill in the gaps" caused by ambiguity or vagueness.

Expressive language: The aspect of spoken language that includes speaking and the aspect of written language that includes composing or writing. Receptive language, on the other hand, includes listening to spoken language and reading written language.

Fluency: In the area of reading, the skill of reading with accuracy, speed, and ease.

Formal assessment: Process of gathering information using standardized, published tests or instruments in conjunction with specific administration and interpretation procedures. An example of a formal assessment is a norm-referenced test. The results of norm-referenced tests or other formal assessments are used to make general instructional decisions.

High engagement: An element of intensive instruction in which each instructional moment is maximized through the use of activities that keep the students' attention focused on critical learning outcomes.

Implicit instruction: Instruction that lies heavily on student-directed learning. The learner is able to understand what is being taught even though it is not directly expressed. Example: It might be obvious to students during a discussion of world events prior to WWII that these events were key factors causing the war, although the teacher never explicitly expressed such a statement. The understanding that the causes of WWII were being discussed was an implicit part of the instruction.

Informal assessment: Process of collecting information to make specific instructional decisions. The information gathered is based on procedures largely designed by teachers and based on the current instructional situation. Example: A teacher might prepare a short quiz over vocabulary related to a current science unit. Results of the quiz would guide the extent to which the teacher would review material in class.

Informative instruction: A way of teaching systematically in which the teacher ensures that the student understands how s/he is learning, how s/he can plan and control his/her own learning at each step of the learning process, and why this is important.

Instructional accommodation: An element of responsive instruction in which changes in instructional groupings, materials, or teaching techniques are made to increase student performance. Instructional accommodations should be made based on the unique information- processing characteristics of the students being taught.

Intensive instruction: A way of directing student attention in which sufficient time is spent in teacher-guided interactive learning activities characterized by a high degree of goal-directed student engagement that leads to student mastery and generalization.

Intervention: The interference with an unsatisfactory course or level of learning or behavior by introducing an element designed to move learning and behavior to a more satisfactory course or level.

Learning strategy: A person's approach to a learning task, which includes how a person thinks and acts when planning, executing, and evaluating performance on a task and its outcomes.

Occupational therapist: A professional who helps people develop or regain skills which are absent because of physical injury, birth defects, aging, or emotional or developmental problems, through purposeful and meaningful activity.

Off-task: Doing or paying attention to something that is not related to the instructional goal that has been established.

Paraphrasing: A learning strategy that involves the learner taking information from reading or listening and rephrasing the information, in his or her own words, in a way that personalizes the information and facilitates understanding and remembering.

Phoneme: The smallest unit of speech that serves to distinguish one utterance from another in a language or dialect, as in the |b| in bat and the |m| in mat. English is made up of 44 phonemes.

Physical therapist: Professional who treats physical disorders with physical and/or mechanical means such as massage, exercise, water, light, heat, etc.

Prediction: A learning strategy that involves taking information gained from listening or reading, identifying questions that emerge, and then guessing the answers before the answers are apparent. Prediction can facilitate understanding and remembering.

Probe: A type of informal assessment embedded in the instructional process used to check progress towards meeting an instructional goal; it is often quick and can be thought of as a question embedded during an explanation or model to monitor comprehension or a careful examination of the product of student work from a regular practice activity.

Receptive language: The aspect of spoken language that includes listening and the aspect of written language that includes reading. Receptive language, on the other hand, includes speaking and writing.

Responsive instruction: A way of making teaching decisions in which a student's reaction to instruction directly shapes how future instruction is provided.

Scaffolded instruction: A way of teaching systematically in which the teacher provides to students, early in the learning process, a significant amount of support in the form of modeling, prompts, direct explanations, and targeted questions. Instruction during this phase is primarily teacher-guided. Then, as students begin to acquire mastery of the targeted objectives, direct teacher supports are reduced and the major responsibility for learning is transferred to the student. When students assume more responsibility, it is referred to as student-guided learning.

Scaffolding: A way of teaching systematically in which the teacher provides to students, early in the learning process, a significant amount of support in the form of modeling, prompts, direct explanations, and targeted questions. Instruction during this phase is primarily teacher-guided. Then, as students begin to acquire mastery of the targeted objectives, direct teacher supports are reduced and the major responsibility for learning is transferred to the student. When students assume more responsibility, it is referred to as student-guided learning.

Self-questioning: A learning strategy that involves identifying cues from information heard or read that make a learner wonder about who, what, when, where, which, and why and ask personalized questions that relate to the information. The learner then reads to find the answers to these questions. This strategy can facilitate understanding and remembering.

Strategic: Relating to the use of knowledge of personal resources to meet the demands of a task in a way that gets the task done in the most effective and efficient manner.

Structured instruction: A way of teaching systematically in which information to be learned is chunked into smaller segments or steps and sequentially taught through a process that involves direct explanation, modeling, and practice.

Sufficient time: An element of intensive instruction in which interactive teaching and learning experiences are sustained until the critical information has been mastered, maintained, and generalized by the student.

Summarizing: A learning strategy that involves concisely restating the main ideas of sections of reading or listening tasks that involve units of information greater than a single paragraph. For example, you would summarize the main ideas of an entire lesson, a story, or a section of history textbook to facilitate understanding and remembering.

Systematic instruction: A way of organizing learning experiences so that both the teacher and the student follow and continuously review a dynamic plan related to how new content will be learned and how that new content relates to past and future learning.

Word recognition: The ability to identify and read a word and understand its meaning.