Author Gwen J. Pauloski introduces four flexible adolescent literacy practices that help secondary students make deeper sense of the complex informational texts they encounter in school and beyond. Adolescent readers learn age-appropriate comprehension strategies and practice applying them as they discuss, analyze, and write about their reading.…

Classrooms are noisy: when children are engaged in solo work, they also hear background babble, noise from outdoor, and people moving around. Few studies investigating the effects of noise on academic tasks use naturalistic stimuli. Questions also remain regarding why some children are more impaired by noise than others. This study compared…

A reader's ability to go beyond their surface-level understanding of words and to build a deeper representation of the text in their mind (i.e., reading comprehension) is predicated on a range of reader- and text-level variables that indicate how well a certain reader can read a certain text. The following study evaluates the extent to which the…

Prior knowledge is one of the strongest contributors to comprehension, but there is little specificity about different aspects of prior knowledge and how they impact comprehension. This article introduces the Multidimensional Knowledge in Text Comprehension framework, which conceptualizes prior knowledge along four intersecting dimensions: amount,…

Prior knowledge is one of the strongest contributors to comprehension, but there is little specificity about different aspects of prior knowledge and how they impact comprehension. This article introduces the Multidimensional Knowledge in Text Comprehension framework, which conceptualizes prior knowledge along four intersecting dimensions: amount,…

We examine the role of culture in comprehension. Prominent theories of comprehension conceptualized the outcome of reading as learners' construction of a cognitive representation of texts. We emphasize that such representation reflects not only texts' content, but also individuals' understandings of the real world, as described in texts. We…

In this study, I investigated the print exposure and website exposure of undergraduates in relation to their scores on a text comprehension test. Print exposure was measured with a national version of the author recognition test, whereas a new website recognition test was developed to measure students' exposure to texts on the internet. The…

According to the multidimensional view of reading comprehension (RAND), reading comprehension (RC) is influenced by three components?: the reader, text, and task. A broader perspective considers factors beyond the cognitive and linguistic dimensions and incorporates the contribution of emotional condition. The present study examined individual…

Researchers and practitioners have identified the ability to read scientific literature effectively as a core competency in undergraduate STEM education, but comparatively little research has been conducted on how students engage, both cognitively and affectively, with advanced scientific research. This mixed-methods study assesses the process…

Teaching for theme is one aspect of reading comprehension that is often elusive for both teachers and students. Specifically, teachers are challenged with elevating students' thinking from the plot level to a more abstract level when teaching for theme understanding. Students are challenged with transitioning between the story world and the real…

I present a sampling of picture books with a focus on three peritextual features in particular: dust jackets, case covers that are different from the dust jackets, and endpapers. First, I briefly highlight scholarship related to peritextual features, followed by a description of four picture books with these three peritextual features, and…

On a daily basis, most people read about issues of interest from a diversity of sources. Moreover, the information they encounter frequently encompass discrepancies, ranging from minor inconsistencies to straight contradictions. Readers may construct coherent representations from discrepant contents by linking contents to their respective sources…

This study examined students' ability to select relevant ideas from multiple online texts and integrate those ideas in their written products. Students (N = 162) used a web-based platform to complete an online inquiry task in which they read three texts presenting different perspectives on computer gaming and wrote an article for a school magazine…

As an internal process, documenting reading comprehension has remained challenging. This paper presents three case studies that explore the transactional practices of literacy education graduate students as they read and annotate assigned texts in an online, asynchronous class. Social annotation tools give multiple students simultaneous access to…

The prevalence of the acronym tl;dr ("too long; didn't read") suggests that people intentionally disengage their attention from long sections of text. We studied this real-world phenomenon in an educational context by measuring rates of intentional and unintentional mind-wandering while undergraduate student participants (n = 80) read…