Students with learning disabilities (LD) in reading often struggle to succeed due to difficulties with reading comprehension. Comprehension difficulties can impact access to a variety of text types, including informational texts. Researchers suggest that students with LD in reading require explicit comprehension supports before, during, and after…

Research has shown that the use of pre-reading activities, such as graphic or advance organizers can positively affect student acquisition of vocabulary and meaning when reading new concepts presented in text. One particularly effective strategy, semantic mapping, can significantly impact students who previously had a lack of prior knowledge on…

To discover if narrative analogies of scientific mechanisms would help readers to comprehend passages describing those mechanisms, four such passages were extracted from an encyclopedia. These original passages were written in expository style and constituted the expository condition. For the narrative condition, simple narrative analogies of…

An experiment was conducted to test the effects of isolating and identifying generalities and instances in written prose instruction on student performance. Eighty college students were given either a typical chapter from a college textbook that included a summary, the same chapter with the summary removed, a modified version of the chapter in…

Use of two direction-setting activities (the basal approach to develop student motivation and the advance organizer approach based on the text outline) to improve content area text comprehension with 24 learning disabled high school students was compared. Results indicated that the advance organizer group significantly outperformed the basal…

Presents a rationale and suggests methods for teaching reading in college social science courses. Urges instructors to stress vocabulary and purpose when making reading assignments. Discusses ways of passage-marking; the skim, question, read, record, and review (SQ3R) method; and assignment mapping. (AYC)

The article describes a four-step procedure for constructing two types of graphic organizers (hierarchical and compare/contrast) to help secondary academically handicapped students gain information from textbooks. Implementation methods include teacher-directed, student-directed with text references, and student-directed with clues. Testing…

Structured overviews can help students and teachers to clarify objectives in content reading. (KS)

Investigates whether using an advance organizer along with metacognitive strategies helps high school students learn content material. Finds that using metacognitive strategies leads to significantly higher reading scores than the use of advance organizers alone or merely reading an introductory passage. Finds that the benefits increase as the…

Offers strategies by which teachers can accommodate individual differences in students' reading abilities by modifying students' experiential background, text content and mode of presentation, or assignments at three points in the reading process. (Author/SJL)

Describes a study in which seventh graders who read a chapter in a science text along with a written handout explaining the major concepts (in simplified vocabulary) performed better on a post-test than the group that simply read the text. (MKM)

Argues that student centered pre-reading activities can convince students they know more than they do about their textbooks. (RB)

Illustrates how advance organizers can be used to aid the second-language decoding process. Devices considered include cognate recognition, syllable-morpheme information, contextualized meaning, chronological ordering, time-frame reference, cross-cultural differences, redefinitions, and direction of discourse. (CB)

Gloss, or marginal notations in a text, and other similar techniques can be used by reading specialists both as they attempt to develop meaningful content area reading programs and as they review what is already known before attempting to learn new information. For example, several social studies teachers began their gloss activities by…

This paper describes the composition of one particular kind of study guide called a pattern guide that can be used by content area teachers to aid their students in reading and understanding their textbooks. The purpose of the guide is stated as highlighting the reading and thinking skills to be used as well as the most important concepts to be…