Computational thinking in the educational environment has awaken a rising interest, having been included as part of the curricula from the very beginnings of education. Programmable robots have become a valuable positive resource in order to succeed in the development of computational thinking, demanding proper training from kindergarten teachers…

In the current study, we investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge in the relation between working memory (WM) and reading comprehension, in a sample of 55 typically developing 8-year-old Italian children. The role of WM in comprehension is well-established, as both involve similar processes for successful task performance (i.e., active…

This research examines the effects of a computer reading program as a supplement to classroom instruction for Kindergarten students across Study 1 and Study 2 (N = 55 and 88, respectively). Students attended schools in suburban settings and all students received their typical balanced literacy programming. Students in the treatment condition used…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of parent-involved reading activities on elementary fourth graders' reading comprehension skills, reading motivation, and attitudes towards reading. Employing a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with a paired control group, data were collected from a total of 100 fourth graders studying…

Purpose: This experimental study aimed to examine the effects of annotating a historical text as a reading comprehension strategy on student academic achievement in an eighth-grade social studies class. Design/methodology/approach: A mixed-method design was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data sequentially. First, the authors…

Students reading below grade level proficiency lack word recognition and comprehension skills. The problem addressed in this quantitative study was that third-grade students in a Title I school in South Carolina are reading below grade-level proficiency, lacking grade-level appropriate word recognition and reading comprehension skills, as…

Learning to read is a critical skill; yet only a small portion of children in the United States are reading at or above grade level. Attention is one crucial process that affects the acquisition of reading skills. The process involves selectively choosing task relevant information and requires monitoring competing demands. Many books for beginning…

The complexity of understanding unit fractions is often underappreciated in instruction. We introduce a continuum of children's understanding of unit fractions to explore this complexity and to help teachers make sense of children's strategies and recognize milestones in the development of unit-fraction understanding. Suggestions for developing…

We investigated the contributions of multiple strands of factors--individual characteristics (struggling reader status, working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, knowledge-based inference, theory of mind, comprehension monitoring), a text feature (narrative vs. expository genre), and question types (literal and inferential)--to one's…

Test-taker characteristics (TTCs), or individual difference variables, are known to be a systematic source of variance in language test performance. Although previous research has documented the impact of a range of TTCs on second language (L2) learners' test performance, few of these studies have involved young learners. Given that young L2…

Mathematical literacy (ML) is considered central to the application of mathematical knowledge in everyday life and thus is found in many comparative international educational standards. However, there exists barely any evidence about predictors and outcomes of ML having a lasting effect on achievement in nonmathematical domains. We drew on a large…

Children's idiom comprehension is an important aspect of language development. Idioms have both literal and figurative meanings, and there are often great differences between literal meaning and figurative meaning, which brings great difficulties to children's accurate understanding of idioms. As a kind of underlying language ability,…

Reading motivation can greatly impact reading comprehension, but it tends to diminish in and beyond elementary school. This study employs knowledge building pedagogy to advance reading motivation and comprehension in an elementary Chinese language arts class. Participants were twenty-four third graders who spent one class period (ie, 40 minutes)…

Schema instruction improves word-problem solving for students with mathematics difficulty (MD; e.g., Powell et al., 2015); however, prior research suggests that students need word-problem-specific language comprehension in addition to schema knowledge to build word-problem models (Fuchs et al., 2015, 2018). Students have general word knowledge…

An A-B-A-B withdrawal design was used to explore the effects of a text-to-speech (TTS) program (Read & Write Gold 11) on reading comprehension scores for two fourth-grade students with learning disabilities in an urban school. For each session, students used the TTS program to read a fourth-grade-level comprehension passage. The number of…