The authors outline results of 3 studies conducted to examine the structure of disciplinary knowledge from reading measured through proximity data. In Study 1, 168 third-grade students were asked to read a science text and rate the relationships of keywords from the passage. From these ratings, comprehension scores were calculated that related…

When students enter middle school, they are confronted with the necessity of learning from complex content-area textbooks. Many students find these texts boring, and they may lack the higher-order reading comprehension skills they need to tackle complex text. Yet the ability to read informational text is essential to success in middle school and…

This study examined the relationships of 3 levels of reading fluency--the individual word, the syntactic unit, and the whole passage--to reading comprehension among 278 5th graders heterogeneous in reading ability. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that reading fluency at each level related uniquely to performance on a standardized reading…