Educators' support when using informational text in kindergarten is foundational to children's comprehension and future learning. Prior research has not offered clear insight into their help when children experience difficulties during informational text comprehension instruction. The current study examined one kindergarten educator's support.…

Although small-group guided reading is traditionally an elementary school instructional practice, this study details how high school English teachers perceived its implementation in high school classrooms. As part of a larger, multiyear research project, this 2-year study examined a dual-level coaching professional learning program that included…

Prior knowledge activation is a crucial component of reading comprehension. Previous studies have examined students' prompted (or solicited) purposeful knowledge activation, which occurs when the explicit goal is to activate knowledge, as well as ancillary knowledge activation, which is when students indirectly use their prior knowledge to fill in…

Current standards push for elementary students to have text-based and text-centric discussions of what they read. This study explored what bilingual third-grade students talked about during small-group text-based discussions of informational texts. The author conducted a qualitative analysis of 10 video-recorded discussions, five of books matched…

This collective case study used methods of discourse analysis to consider what computer-mediated collaboration might reveal about preservice teachers' sense-making in a field-based practicum as they learn to teach reading to children identified as struggling readers. Researchers agree that field-based experiences coupled with time for reflection…

This qualitative research study examined 13 preschool to third-grade teachers' experiences reading and discussing culturally relevant texts (CRTs) with their students. Teachers worked at four schools in a large urban school district and with child populations from different sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds. We employed provisional and…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive case study was to explore the teacher/student reading conferences in two first grade teachers' classrooms in one primary school. Sixteen one-to-one reading conferences were recorded and transcribed over a two-month period and coded for content as related to the CAFÉ (Boushey & Moser, 2009) model of…

In this study, we examined the role of morphology, an important yet largely understudied source of difficulty, in reading ability among 7th grade students in one junior high school in the southwestern United States. We sought to find out how much variance in reading ability is accounted for by these students' morphological knowledge, and whether…

An essential element in teaching children to effectively comprehend text is the use of teacher-led think alouds. The article follows a semester-long project with 31 inservice teachers, who planned, implemented, transcribed, and reflected upon think aloud lessons to build student comprehension. Through multiple exposures to think alouds, teachers…

This study integrated technology tools into a reading comprehension intervention that used explicit instruction to teach strategies (i.e., asking questions, making connections, and coding the text to monitor for meaning) to mixed-ability small groups, which included four English Learners with learning disabilities in a fourth-grade general…

This manuscript focuses on fifth graders' understanding of science fiction. It is argued that it is necessary for students to understand both reading strategies and the key elements of a genre for comprehension. Students read "The Giver" within literature circles and conversation and written responses about the book were used for…

The merits of decentralized small groups has been questioned in literature and by practicing teachers; thus this study shows the academic and identity work children do as they attempt to make meaning in these spaces. This study explores the affordances and drawbacks of decentralized small group discussion contexts in a multiage (3rd/4th) grade…

Instructional design is an integral part of a balanced approach to teaching vocabulary instruction. This article presents several instructional procedures using research-based vocabulary strategies and explains how to design and adapt those strategies in order to reach desired learning outcomes. Emphasis is placed on research-based principles that…

This systematic descriptive historical review was conducted to examine the status and trends in expository text structure instruction efficacy research for first through twelfth grade students. The analysis included sixty studies, which spanned the years 1978 to 2014. Descriptive dimensions of the research included study type, research design,…

This study examined how reading comprehension was addressed in literacy texts used with preservice teachers at five universities in the southwestern United States. Universities were selected based on the highest number of graduates receiving their initial Early Childhood through 4th grade (EC-4) teaching certificates. An introductory Reading…