Knowledge activation and knowledge building are essential for reading comprehension. Yet, how can teachers support students in accessing and applying their existing knowledge and experiences during reading? This article provides six evidence-based principles to consider during literacy instruction, which are drawn from a recent systematic…

Comprehending texts in content areas can be challenging for students with learning disabilities (LD) because they may lack the necessary background and vocabulary knowledge needed to construct meaning from text. As more students with LD are educated in the general education classroom, it is necessary for teachers to implement strategies to…

Reading comprehension is not a skill someone learns and can then apply in different reading contexts. It is one of the most complex activities that readers engage in on a regular basis, and the ability to comprehend is dependent upon a wide range of knowledge and skills. Despite a common view about comprehension, several lines of enquiry have…

Financial literacy is an important skillset for individuals to have so they can properly manage their financial well-being. Individuals across the United States are lacking in financial literacy, and therefore often struggle with navigating major financial events in addition to their daily personal finance decisions. K-12 family and consumer…

Learning theories provide philosophically informed, basic principles for understanding the mechanisms through which people learn based on a combination of field or laboratory studies. Unfortunately, however, there are several clear conflicts between theoretical approaches and common methods in teaching. Consequently, key challenges among teachers…

This paper discusses the implications of health literacy during the COVID-19 pandemic for adults with lower literacy skills. It highlights the challenges faced by individuals in understanding complex health information and emphasizes the role of adult educators in providing trustworthy and comprehensible health information. Incorporating health…

Background: Recent complex and cross-boundary policy problems, such as climate change, pandemics, and financial crises, have recentred debates about state capacity, democratic discontent and the 'crisis of expertise'. These problems are contested and open to redefinition, misunderstanding, spin, and deception, challenging the ability of…

In the field of educational technology and instructional design, research methods are emerging that aim to curate different forms of knowledge and insights beyond traditional research studies, or what Reigeluth and An (in Reigeluth and Carr-Chellman (eds) Instructional-design theories and models: Building a common knowledge base, Lawrence Erlbaum…

To make progress in improving students' reading comprehension, we need to rethink the very nature of reading comprehension -- it's not a skill and it requires background knowledge. James Kim and Mary Burkhauser explain that, to help students apply what they learn from one reading task to another reading task, educators should consider developing…

Elementary-level teacher Redford dispels the idea that instructional time should not be spent teaching content material because content is now Googleable. As research shows, background knowledge significantly influences basic comprehension, even in very young students; students need a core of background knowledge to decipher texts and understand…

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience associated difficulties in reading comprehension. This may be due to the social nature of fictional texts, which require the reader to interpret what characters are thinking and feeling and to make inferences about the cause and effect between events in a story. This paper outlines…

Beginning in early 2020, the world began experiencing the first effects of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As with other new emerging infectious diseases, it had been noted that a medical student's ability to read about and learn the correct reactions to this kind of event is urgent (Al-Mohrej & Agha, 2017). Therefore, medical school…

Mathematics education research has focused on developing teachers' knowledge or other visible aspects of the teaching practice. This paper contributes to conversations around making a teacher's thinking visible and enhancing a teacher's pedagogical reasoning by exploring the use of pedagogical documentation. In this paper, we describe how a…

Adult learners with low literacy skills compose a highly heterogeneous population in terms of demographic variables, educational backgrounds, knowledge and skills in reading, self-efficacy, motivation etc. They also face various difficulties in consistently attending offline literacy programs, such as unstable worktime, transportation…

The article maintains that the "Teaching for Understanding" movement successfully achieved one key objective -- developing effective teaching frameworks for understanding the subjects taught in schools. However, it failed with respect to two other core objectives -- constructing a comprehensive educational concept that promotes in-depth,…