Teaching reading can be simplistically divided into two sections: learning how to read, known as decoding, and deriving meaning from the printed word, known as comprehension. Many educators still hold to the position that these skills should be taught linearly with an emphasis on comprehension lagging considerably behind the teaching of decoding.…

Have we been teaching reading well? Close reading has been the signature practice in literary studies. More recently, however, postcritique has polemically revised this traditional mode of teaching reading. This essay proposes the initial framework for a novel arts-based pedagogy based on Spoken-Word Song, bridging critical literary interpretation…

In educational settings, students read for multiple purposes, such as preparing for an exam, practicing a new reading strategy, writing an essay, and more. Because reading is a goal-directed activity, providing students with task instructions can help them create goals for reading and develop a plan to meet these goals. In the current experiment,…

Teachers in any discipline where reading matters should practice a robust scaffolding pedagogy to teach critical reading, in contrast to the more common but less direct approaches that often leave students to learn or not learn these skills themselves. In this essay, I describe how to adapt established methods for teaching writing (including…

The role of the teacher, specifically teacher craft, is central to engaging students in effective reading instruction. However, the science of reading has revealed that the content taught is also important to reading acquisition. Although the science of reading was aggregated some two decades ago to result in what became known as the five big…

Informational texts present complex content using language that is simultaneously technical, abstract, dense, and authoritative. This article describes practical strategies to support teachers in using informational picture books to prepare upper elementary school students for navigating the complex language demands necessitated by expository…

As the world around us becomes more accessible, so do our students' options to engage with that information. With the increased disconnect within the classroom, many educators are seeking ways to re-engage students. Research supports the use of choice for reading within the classroom to increase engagement. The article establishes the impact of…

Only 35% of fourth graders in the United States can read at the proficient level, and only 34% of eighth graders can read proficiently (National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], 2022). The purpose of this study was to determine how preservice teachers (PSTs) describe their experience of the methodology of teaching reading in their…

Students in the 3rd and 4th grade often encounter what has been called a reading "slump" when their class curriculums increasingly ask them to comprehend and learn from texts. Students are more likely to struggle if they have not been offered sufficient opportunities to build world and domain knowledge and engage in challenging…

Research has consistently established the positive impact of sharing books with young children. Evidence suggests several important factors when evaluating book sharing with young children, including the quality of educator practice = and the nature of groupings, as well as the frequency and duration of book sharing sessions and access to books.…

Strategy instruction is a common instructional method for teaching academic skills, particularly reading comprehension, and it is commonly combined with self-regulation components (e.g., goal setting, self-monitoring). Previous meta-analyses and reviews have examined the effectiveness of strategy instruction on reading comprehension, but have not…

The research problem addressed in this study was the low reading achievement scores of fourth grade students and fourth grade reading teachers' struggles raising reading achievement. The purpose of the study was to explore fourth grade reading teachers' experiences of finding strategies and interventions to improve reading achievement. The…

This study examined the challenges teachers faced in teaching reading comprehension to secondary students within the study school. Reading comprehension is a key skill for academic success, yet many students struggle to understand complex texts in subjects such as history, science, and mathematics. The purpose of this research is to assess how…

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…

In this dissertation, I report results from a study that investigated the impact of students' engagement in a series of tasks in an introductory proof course that was designed to stimulate their learning of reading strategies to support their comprehension of mathematics proofs. Specifically, I investigated the impact of the design of five…