The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the broader college and career readiness agenda encourage educators, researchers, and other stakeholders to focus on preparing students for life after high school. A key emphasis is literacy, as the ability to read and comprehend written language is critical to success in college and careers.…

Developmental differences in summaries of expository texts were examined for fourth and sixth grade students in two experiments. Experiment 1 used texts that had a description content structure whereas Experiment 2 texts had a thesis/evidence content structure. Manipulation of the presence or absence of the topic sentence allowed the examination…

The reading achievement test scores of 239 low-income, southern, urban black students in grades three through eight were compared with their ability to comprehend the social studies books used in their classrooms. Achievement scores were obtained from the reading subtests of the Stanford Achievement Tests. A cloze passage was developed based on…

Prepared by members of the Institute for Research on Teaching and the Center for the Study of Reading, the papers in this collection examine reading comprehension as an interactive process and explore how comprehension instruction occurs in the complex workplace of the classroom. Specific topics discussed in 20 papers include the following: (1)…