Purpose: Complex features of science texts present idiosyncratic challenges for middle grade readers, especially in a post-Common Core educational world where students' learning is dependent on understanding informational text. The primary aim of this study was to explore how middle school readers process science texts and whether such…

Teacher Geneviève DeBose Akinnagbe discusses her school's--and her own--improvement in the area of writing instruction. While she is a strong believer in teacher-led change, she says the change in this case was mainly the result of the school's becoming more intentional, at an organizational level, about the teaching of writing. The progress truly…

Struck by what he saw as the complexity, artistry and cognitive achievement of historians' narrative accounts, Robin Kemp decided to explore ways of teaching his pupils to write narrative and to analyse the role of such writing in developing various kinds of historical thinking. Working with Year 8 and Year 10 he designed a research project that…

The definition of literacy has become narrow, bounded, and associated predominantly with measurement of cognitive skills used to decode words. In this article, the author explores the absence in the literacy instruction of a clear, deliberate, and intentional focus upon "connectedness" between the reader and the text. The author maintains that…

Offers a model which is intended to facilitate the processing of ideational relationships within a paragraph and which is composed of three distinct parts: (1) direct teaching, (2) functional application, and (3) increased student interaction with the text. (FL)