Today's students live within a world filled with complexity, uncertainty, and misinformation; thus, educators need to help all learners, including students with learning disabilities, how to comprehend complex information about the natural world and make credible evidence-based claims. Our study is a first step in making this possible. In this…

More knowledge is needed regarding the student factors that impact academic reading and success in college beyond traditional measures of college readiness. This study examined the contributions of student factors specified by the Proficient Academic Reader framework--reading literacy skills, metacognitive reading strategies, and reading…

Access to core subject-area curriculum for students from immigrant backgrounds who are learning the dominant language of instruction has long been a barrier to equitable education around the world, especially in secondary schools. This article explores the promise of Complex Instruction (CI) to address barriers to access for such multilingual…

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of students' background knowledge and how they utilized "don't know" affordances to comprehend and learn from text. In two studies, over 8,000 middle and high school students interacted with a content-area learning environment in which they answered a series of background…

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of students' background knowledge and how they utilized "don't know" affordances to comprehend and learn from text. In two studies, over 8,000 middle and high school students interacted with a content-area learning environment in which they answered a series of background…

Being able to identify the main ideas within a complex multi-paragraph content-area text is an essential reading comprehension skill. It is especially important for content-area and special education co-teachers to provide explicit instruction in this skill to meet the needs of their students with learning disabilities who frequently struggle with…

Background: Reading comprehension is an essential skill not only during learning but also to successfully navigate everyday life. However, reading comprehension is a task that is challenging even among some adept readers. Thus, in the present investigation, we explored how to improve reading comprehension skills among a sample of middle school…

The literacy instruction that adolescent emergent bilingual (EB) students currently receive is insufficient to improve their writing proficiency (Graham et al., 2021; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). To promote improvements in EBs' writing, evidence-based practices that are culturally and linguistically responsive must be provided…

Disciplinary literacy strategies in mathematics lessons are essential and may be embedded in three necessary parts of the lesson: before reading, during reading, and after reading. In this article, we highlight disciplinary literacy strategies that middle school mathematics teachers might implement to guide students to increased mathematical…

Is there a way of reading literature that is specialized for teaching? Research into the teaching of mathematics has identified a specialized form of content knowledge (SCK, Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008) that is significantly linked to student learning (Hill, Ball, & Rowan, 2005). Despite the centrality of literature to the teaching of…

As leisure-time reading among adolescents declines in the western world, stakeholders try to increase students' motivation for school-related reading. We examine the relationship of students' autonomous and controlled reading motivation with their amount and experiences of school-related reading in four school subjects, controlling for students'…

In co-taught classes, general education and special education teachers can improve the content-area learning and literacy skills of students with learning disabilities by helping them read texts effectively. Co-teachers can improve comprehension by providing students with background and vocabulary knowledge before reading. In this article, a…

This case study describes how culturally relevant pedagogy can be used in disciplinary rigorous ways in an urban middle school history classroom. The focus is on a unit about the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which provided a setting for teaching about the event as well as the historical thinking practices of contextualizing, sourcing, and…

As school districts adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS), content area teachers were expected to incorporate disciplinary literacy skills into their lessons. The problem for this study was that secondary school science and social studies teachers struggle to teach students how to read and understand informational text. The purpose of this…

Students in the middle grades are expected to read complex texts to acquire content knowledge, particularly in social studies/history and science. Most students with disabilities are included in social studies/history and science classes and yet read below grade level, requiring significant support with accessing text knowledge. Question…