To promote independent reading in middle school, teachers must understand why adolescents choose to read or not read a specific book. Yet, there is limited research on the factors that students consider when evaluating books that teachers have introduced them to in class. This study aimed to describe factors that 43 Grade 7 and 8 students noted as…

The author explored text difficulty for third-grade bilingual students reading below grade level. In six small-group discussions, students read and discussed informational texts matched to their reading levels, and in six other sessions they read and discussed texts one year ahead of their reading levels. The alternating treatment design and…

This article is a commentary of a paper by Derek C. Briggs and Frederick A. Peck, "Using Learning Progressions to Design Vertical Scales That Support Coherent Inferences about Student Growth," which describes an elegant potential framework for at least beginning to address three priorities in large-scale assessment that have not been…

The proposals for the revised National Curriculum in English suggest limiting the pre-twentieth century poetry that GCSE pupils read to "representative Romantic poetry" (Department for Education [DFE], 2013, p. 4). This paper argues that poetry of the early modern period is challenging and enriching study for adolescent pupils and that…

This article studies the effects of complexity and completeness in an introductory psychology textbook on students' understanding of the text materials. It was found that students presented with oversimplified versions made incorrect references. Complex presentation, however, did not adversely affect the students' test responses. (JAZ)

The contribution of passage variables, question types, and format variables to reading comprehension was assessed for 50 successful and 50 unsuccessful readers. A three-stage conditional regression assessed the predictability of 20 predictor features on item difficulty scores. The location of response information and stem length accounted for…

This case study of a struggling reader suggests that learning to read is not necessarily about using the right program, but rather about making the right connection. This case describes how Ashley, a child with special needs, came to literacy in her own way in the company of Barbara Park's fictional character, Junie B. Jones, a girl about her age…

A study reexamined data from an earlier study of the effect of teacher questioning techniques on students' understanding of and responses to literature. Data were reexamined for instructional correlates of difficulty of recall and difficulty of depth of understanding. Subjects, 1,041 students in 58 eight-grade English classes in 16 midwestern…