Many students struggle to acquire adequate reading comprehension and writing skills. Although word recognition and spelling are needed to fully actualize these skills, the oral language aspects of reading and writing can be taught and practiced without text. Oral storytelling is good for all students, but it may be essential for students with…

This article focuses on the development of the Texas comprehension standards as found in the comprehension strand of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). The standards are described in relation to effective comprehension strategies.

This review describes a computational chemistry exercise aimed at enhancing the understanding of upper-division undergraduates in organic chemistry and physical chemistry regarding the structures and aromaticities of cyclobutadiene and cyclooctatetraene. This exercise exposes students to chemical problems that require computational methods as a…

Undergraduates report a variety of reasons for not reading assigned text(s), including confusion regarding instructors' expectations, while faculty report using reading as a major instructional tool and attest to the negative consequences of students' lack of reading. To bridge this divide, we propose Task-Oriented Reading Instruction (TORI) as a…

The conventional wisdom among educators and literacy gurus is that reading comprehension depends on the acquisition of isolatable, teachable, and generalizable skills. Consequently, many elementary and middle school English classrooms follow the "reading workshop" model, an approach to literacy instruction, with several variations that…

The goal of teaching children to read is not for them to learn a set of discrete decoding skills, it is to have the reader obtain meaning from the words on the printed page, to understand the message which the writer tried to convey when he wrote down the words. The goal is comprehension of the printed word. While children are taught multiple…

Facilitating rigorous and interactive (dialogic) classroom text discussions that build reading comprehension skills requires advanced forms of expertise and skills. The authors describe three different ways that discussions can evolve when practicing teachers take up the work of making their discussions more dialogic. The authors then describe…

While reading digital texts requires many of the same foundational literacy skills as reading printed texts, it also requires skills that go beyond print-based reading. In this article, we argue that the skills children need to read, understand, and communicate about digital texts is a Core Disciplinary Practice that should be addressed in the…

Reading, like all areas of human learning, is complex and multidimensional. Educational psychology has an opportunity to contribute further to a science of reading, and potentially to a science of reading instruction, by expanding its traditional theoretical and methodological orientations to embrace this complexity. Topics central to this effort…

This brief is one in a series aimed at providing K-12 education decision makers and advocates with an evidence base to ground discussions about how to best serve students during and following the novel coronavirus pandemic. It addresses one central question: How can system leaders improve reading comprehension for students in kindergarten to grade…

We suggest that a healthy literacy diet for beginning readers consists of literacy experiences along a number of dimensions, including experiences with decodable text. As such, this article explores the role of decodable texts in a comprehensive early literacy curriculum that recognizes literacy as a complex, culturally mediated, and multifaceted…

Learning theories provide philosophically informed, basic principles for understanding the mechanisms through which people learn based on a combination of field or laboratory studies. Unfortunately, however, there are several clear conflicts between theoretical approaches and common methods in teaching. Consequently, key challenges among teachers…

This article discusses research into the role of audio-visual input for second language (L2) or foreign language learning. It also addresses questions related to the effectiveness of audio-visual input with different types of on-screen text such as subtitles (i.e., in learners' first language) and captions (i.e., subtitles in the same language as…

Despite strong theoretical and empirical evidence suggesting that word meaning knowledge plays a critical role in word reading, interventions for students with word reading difficulties and disabilities frequently target word reading instruction in isolation. This article connects reading theory to practice by describing one approach to integrate…

Children from economically disadvantaged communities have a disproportionate risk of exposure to chemicals, social stress, and learning difficulties. Although animal models and epidemiologic studies link exposures and neurodevelopment, little focus has been paid to academic outcomes in environmental health studies. Similarly, in the educational…