Reviews research on metacomprehension, indicating that awareness and control of cognitive activity are key characteristics of successful independent readers. Presents findings from a study of 25 university students taught to use a text-marking system. Reports that the system led to more sophisticated levels of metacognitive awareness. Sample text…

Charts the process by which, over some 10 years, one reader came to read a particular text "with full understanding." Indicates how crucial in that process were the complex, interacting influences of other, simpler literary texts, of the reader's own life experience, and (paradoxically) of "family" experience not consciously…

Discusses how psychologists use affect, behavior, and cognition (ABCs) to understand people. Argues that teachers can use these same three domains to learn more about readers, and to assess the ABCs of attitude toward the reading experience. Recommends the use of literature circles and dialog journals as simple, effective instructional techniques…

Considers how textual and digital visual worlds come together to create new ways of thinking about text and the nature of representation. Compares the graphic space of the printed page and the digital space of screen displays. Argues that each of these two mediums supports a distinctive yet vital way of thinking and that neither can be dispensed…

Describes strategies to facilitate college students learning from scientific journal articles. Builds upon a variant of SQ3R as a basic strategy and utilizes a cognitive strategy instruction (CSI) model for sequencing instruction. (NH)

In this investigation, we examine the availability of text elements over the course of reading a text. We describe the Landscape model (van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm, 1999) that captures, in one theoretical framework, multiple cognitive processes during reading and the resulting fluctuating activations of text elements. To demonstrate…

Journal writing on literary topics is an ideal activity in a classroom that emphasizes the transformational role of education, bringing together the creation of meaning between the reader and the text on the one hand, and on the other hand, the creation of expressive or reflexive writing. An activity, in a freshman literature and writing class for…

Argues that picture books pose difficulties for young children who are not yet equipped to interpret them. (AEW)

Records the attempts of a very young child to construct his own understanding of what it means to die and of the social impact of death within his own culture. Includes transcripts in which the child uses narrative to frame his first, tentative ideas about death and responds to literature to further extend his understanding. (JD)

Describes a metacognitive study method, LETME, designed to help students manage the entire study process by facilitating the understanding, selection, organization, retention, and analysis of information from expository text. (DF)

Examines the effects of specific task-related information on undergraduates' studying behaviors and question-answering performance and indicates that specific postreading response criteria significantly improved the question-answering performance of readers.(DF)

Finds that journalistic story frames (such as human interest, conflict, or personal consequences) significantly affected the topical focus and evaluative implications of thoughts generated by readers. Shows that evaluations and opinions offered by participants indicated that news frames also subtly could affect audience decision making about…

The predictions that 48 students with deafness in grades 4-8 made while reading narrative text were analyzed to explore the influence of the children's expectations for text structure and content on reading comprehension. Findings indicated that interacting at a deep level with narrative text was more related to reader characteristics than to…

Recent criticism of rhetorical invention faults the discipline for not promoting "advanced literacy," defined as the use of critical reading and writing abilities to serve social ends. Aristotle's vision of rhetoric has contributed significantly to a cognitive view of invention, but Aristotle also acknowledged the importance of social…

Defining reading as a constructive process involving an interaction of the reader, the text, and the context, this paper offers a model of student cognitive processing that incorporates research in reading, thinking, teaching, and instructional materials. The first section of the paper provides the theoretical context for developing the model,…