Gateway science courses are an ongoing obstacle to recruitment into STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Students come into courses that have a high cognitive load, which makes success in the course challenging. Instructional design can be used to reduce cognitive load. The findings demonstrate that leveraging pre- and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of student-generated drawing and imagination on learning recall, learning transfer, and cognitive load, and also students' attitudes towards the learning strategies when learning a computer-based science text, compared to learning with provided pictures. The study used three groups: drawing…

Research Findings: This study examines the complexities of enacting an explicit content-rich curriculum in a large urban school district. Thirty-six teachers from 12 elementary schools, preK through Grade 1 were recruited to teach the "World of Words," an integrated science and literacy supplementary curriculum. Prior to the start of the…

Research indicates the benefits of collaborative learning for supporting academic literacy in content classrooms, especially for diverse and exceptional students such as students with learning disabilities or English learners (ELs) who can become disengaged in content classrooms if they struggle to access complex, content-related texts. Drawing…

Rising expectations for middle grade students to independently read and comprehend complex, discipline-specific texts have also raised expectations for the ways teachers will teach. Helping all students, despite assessed reading levels, to access grade level texts calls for instructional approaches that not only meet readers where they are, but…

Focusing on what authors can do to facilitate learning from content area textbooks, this report labels authors as "considerate," providing text that readers can understand with a minimum of cognitive effort, or as "inconsiderate," creating text that requires a conscientious, highly skilled effort if readers are to comprehend…

It is not enough for students of English as a second language enrolled in English-language elementary school programs to speak English fluently at the conversational level; they must be provided with language and an environment for continuing cognitive development through the application of high-level thinking skills, often without the benefit of…

An 11 page chapter from a sixth grade social studies text was used in a study assessing the complexities of comprehending social studies materials and the sensitivity of prospective and experienced teachers to these complexities. A sentence-by-sentence analysis of the thinking operations required for mastery of the material showed that numerous…

A study investigated how students' mental representation of an expository text and the inferences they used in summarizing varied as a function of text difficulty and of differences in the task. Subjects, 96 college students and students from grades 6 and 10, wrote summaries of expository texts and answered orally several probe questions about the…