According to an aptitude-treatment interaction experiment (Lehmann et al., "Metacognition and Learning, 11," 89-105, 2016, N = 47, published in "Metacognition and Learning"), perceptually disfluent texts facilitated retention and comprehension performance (but not transfer performance) only for learners with higher working…

Reading comprehension is critical and challenging for the English learning process. EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners often do not understand the meaning of the text due to the lack of an authentic learning context. This easily leads learners to read literally without deeply understanding. To address this issue, an article-structure…

In the Netherlands, the quality of the reading curriculum is currently under debate because of disappointing results on national and international assessments of students' reading skills and motivation. In a mixed-method study, we analyzed the content of Dutch textbooks for reading comprehension instruction (i.e., the implemented curriculum) and…

Taking Swedish secondary school students as a point of departure, this article focuses on aspects of teaching and learning critical literacy and specifically on what students identify as argumentative text structure. Challenges connected to teaching critical literacies can be considered quite big, since studies show that students have difficulties…

The present study investigated whether text structure inference skill (i.e., the ability to infer overall text structure) has unique predictive value for expository text comprehension on top of the variance accounted for by sentence reading fluency, linguistic knowledge and metacognitive knowledge. Furthermore, it was examined whether the unique…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language. Design/methodology/approach: In all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing…

The purpose of this study was to examine moment-by-moment fluctuations in text comprehension processing and determine how and when poor and good comprehenders differ. To do so, we reanalyzed a dataset of think-aloud protocols from 138 intermediate elementary students. Both good and poor comprehenders used a variety of processing strategies when…

This study analyzed the potential transfer effects on reading comprehension skills of two different training programs administered to 9- to 10-year-old children attending fourth grade classes. One training program was based on a working memory updating paradigm (i.e., words, digits, sentence and text updating working memory tasks). The other…

Mira Bai, a saint-poet of North India is an important figure in medieval Hindi literature. Her "bhajan"-s (songs) profoundly represent the transforming of consciousness working through conceptual metaphors which fall in the realm of religious poetry wherein target domains are generally abstract. Since, the working of the mind is more…

We investigated the online and offline effects of learner and instructional characteristics on conceptual change of a robust misconception in science. Fifty-nine undergraduate university students with misconceptions about evolution were identified as espousing evaluativist or non-evaluativist epistemic beliefs in science. Participants were…

Reading comprehension in the content areas is a challenge for many middle grade students. Text structure-based instruction has yielded positive outcomes in reading comprehension at all grade levels in small and large studies. The text structure strategy delivered via the web, called Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy…

Reading and comprehending content area texts require learners to effectively select and encode with hierarchically strategic memory structures in order to combine new information with prior knowledge. Unfortunately, evidence from state and national tests shows that children fail to successfully navigate the reading comprehension challenges they…

The purpose of the present pedagogical experience was to address the English language writing needs of university-level students pursuing a degree in bilingual education with an emphasis in the teaching of English. Using mentor texts and coding academic writing structures, an instructional design was developed to directly address the shortcomings…

In an effort to identify effective instructional practices for teaching writing to elementary grade students, we conducted a meta-analysis of the writing intervention literature, focusing our efforts on true and quasi-experiments. We located 115 documents that included the statistics for computing an effect size (ES). We calculated an average…

Preliminary efficacy data are reported for a research-based reading intervention designed for struggling readers in high school. PHAST PACES teaches (a) word identification strategies, (b) knowledge of text structures, and (c) reading comprehension strategies. In a quasi-experimental design, 268 intervention and 83 waiting list control students…