Paula Worth draws on three professional traditions in history education in order to build a lesson sequence on the Crusades for her Year 7s. First, she draws on the growing tradition of classroom practice using historical scholarship, not only to inform the teacher's knowledge but to deepen her pupils' direct acquaintance with scholarly work.…

Secondary-level content area teachers face unique challenges in helping their students successfully read, understand, and learn content from complex texts in their discipline. In this article, a set of research-based practices designed to provide effective and feasible instruction to improve students' reading and comprehension of text and content…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the perceptions of general education middle school social studies teachers related to their teaching practices and the inclusion of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in their classrooms. More specifically, an in-depth exploration of general education social studies teachers'…

This article conveys the findings from 2 separate, but related, investigations designed to uncover students' perceptions of reading and learning in middle school social studies as well as their engagement in this content area. Study 1 utilized semistructured interviews as an initial foray into understanding students' perceptions of reading and…

To graduate from high school and become competitive in the workplace and other postsecondary endeavors, adolescents are required to meet rigorous standards, such as the Common Core State Standards. To meet such standards, teachers must teach students to read and make sense of increasingly complex content-area expository text. Secondary teachers,…

With the acceptance by many states of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, new emphasis is being placed on students' ability to engage in mathematical practices such as understanding problems (including word problems), reading and critiquing arguments, and making explicit use of definitions (CCSSI 2010). Engaging students in…

Innovative, well-designed school library programs can be critical resources for helping students meet high standards of college and career readiness. In "School Libraries and Student Learning", Rebecca J. Morris shows how school leaders can make the most of their school libraries to support ambitious student learning. She offers…

The present study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) to provide a profile of Massachusetts English Language Learners (ELLs) and policy recommendations for improving their outcomes. ESE was concerned about previous study findings that most of these learners exited ELL instructional programs…

In spite of national initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, American students continue to be struggling readers. Research on content area reading strategies (CARS) has shown that such strategies increase students' ability to read and comprehend text. The purpose of this research was to assess agricultural educators'…

The recent call for a disciplinary perspective on literacy instruction in the content areas has generated considerable interest among literacy educators. This column addresses some of the questions that have been raised about disciplinary literacy. These questions concern the definition and assessment of disciplinary literacy, as well as the…

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) was created to support teachers in implementing college and career readiness standards in order to teach literacy skills throughout the content areas. Teachers work collaboratively with coaches to further develop their expertise and design standards-driven, literacy-rich writing assignments within their…

Developing a large and rich vocabulary is central to learning to read. Children must know the words that make up written texts in order to understand them, especially as the vocabulary demands of content-related materials increase in the upper grades. Studies have documented that the size of a person's vocabulary is strongly related to how…

Concerns about the ability of post-secondary students to read scholarly materials are well documented in the literature. A key aspect of reading at the deeper level expected of these students is connecting new information to prior knowledge. This study is based on an activity where students were explicitly required to make such connections as part…

In each edition of their book "Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools", Levstik and Barton (2011) encourage us to take a mental journey to imagine classrooms where students regularly "do history" (xi). The social studies experiences that many educators envision for elementary classrooms…

This research was designed to investigate the effectiveness of using the think-aloud strategy to improve the reading comprehension in the content area of science. Based on state standards assessments, many early elementary grade students who were considered fluent readers struggled with evaluative science comprehension. In this quasi-experimental…