The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between the amounts of time that U.S. and Chilean students spend on conventional academic reading, extracurricular reading, and Facebook and also to report the types of materials they prefer to read. The study surveyed students in the United States (n = 1,265) and Chile (n = 2,076)…

This study explored the extent to which an 18-day history and writing curriculum intervention, taught over the course of one year, helped culturally and academically diverse adolescents achieve important disciplinary literacy learning in history. Teachers used a cognitive apprenticeship form of instruction for the integration of historical reading…

Based on the analysis of 620 think-aloud verbal protocols from students in grades 7, 9, and 11, we examined students' conscious engagement in inference generation, paraphrasing, verbatim text repetition, and monitoring while reading narrative or informational texts that were either at or above the students' current reading levels. Students were…

Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers' comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers' beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers'…

Core reading programs provide the curriculum and guide the instruction for many classroom teachers. The purpose of this study was to conduct a curriculum analysis of comprehension instruction in the five most widely used core reading programs. The recommended comprehension instruction in grades 3, 4, and 5 was examined to answer four questions:…

Reports from research and the larger educational community demonstrate that too many students have limited ability to comprehend texts. The research reported here involved a two-year study in which standardized comprehension instruction for representations of two major approaches was designed and implemented. The effectiveness of the two…

Studies the reading comprehension of high school students who read three expository passages of increasing difficulty. Finds that the two groups use the same type and number of strategies on the easy passage, but as the passage difficulty increased, good comprehenders use more types of strategies and use strategies more often than the poor…

Finds sequences of "episodes" that included various reading and talk strategies within emergent reading done by preschoolers. Indicates that children accumulate a repertoire of strategies, rather than abandoning old strategies as they develop new ones. Reveals several book, setting, and reading factors that contributed to changing strategies…

Examines the tongue-twister effect to help determine the role of phonological information during silent reading. Concludes that the tongue-twister effect results from phonetic rather than visual confusion, and that the locus of the effect is within working memory. (MG)

Examines the influence of prior knowledge on expert readers' strategies to identify and state a text's main idea. Identifies three methods of constructing the main idea: automatic construction; draft-and-revision; and topic/comment. Concludes that expert readers' construction of the main idea is often a mediated, strategic task. (RS)

Explores the nature and use of reading in an inquiry-based high school mathematics classroom. Finds multiple ways of reading in a semester-long course on "mathematical connections," and that these reading practices constituted ways to learn and do mathematics. Suggests that students learn with and through as well as from text in…

Investigates text cues and comprehension strategies used by competent readers comprehending lengthy written arguments. Finds that both text structure and signaling in introductions and conclusions consistently influenced the 12th-grade advanced placement English students' responses. Notes that these cues helped students recognize the argument…

Tests undergraduate students on efficiencies of lexical access, semantic memory access, verbal working memory span, contextual priming, and efficiency with which anaphors are resolved. Finds that none of the reading subcomponent measures correlated with comprehension when subjects were not under a time pressure, but a number of these measures…

Examines three experiments about how readers combine immediate sentence context with information presented earlier in a paragraph in processing words in text. Finds that discourse information operates interactively with local context to affect readers' expectations for and processing of upcoming words. (MG)

Examines how bilingualism and biliteracy affect metacognition. Finds three strategies unique to successful Latina/o readers: (1) they actively transferred information across languages; (2) they translated from one language to another but most often from Spanish to English; and (3) they openly accessed cognate vocabulary when they read. (RS)