The author of this article describes an intermediate economics course structured around outside readings, which include academic journal papers, policy briefs, and news articles. Students complete low-stakes, high-frequency writing assignments that promote accountability and encourage critical thinking about the readings. This pairing of outside…

The Key Stage 2 Reading Standard Assessment Test (SAT) is a national test of reading comprehension taken by all 11-year olds in state schools in England. The results of this high-stakes test are used for accountability and comparative purposes. While it is acknowledged that these uses have a negative impact on both schools and pupils [Education…

Reading is one of the most basic academic skills. An accurate monitor of one's text comprehension (i.e., metacomprehension) is essential for effective reading as it guides learning and choices of appropriate strategy used to maximize overall understanding. The processes of reading comprehension and metacomprehension are affected by text-related,…

In this essay, we reinterpret critical literacy through our engagement with structured word inquiry (SWI). By reflecting upon our experiences within a literacy practicum for educators earning their reading specialist certification, we demonstrate how SWI can provide students and educators with opportunities to transcend the limitations of a scope…

This article discusses the impact of a professional learning activity called the Principals as Literacy Leaders (PALL) program on the capacity of school leaders to engage, involve, and support teachers and their school communities to develop a shared moral purpose for making their school more effective in assisting students to become more able…

The long-standing research to practice gap and increased interest in scientific literacy instruction has contributed to the oversimplification of what is deemed as foundational skills in US early literacy classrooms. Invoking a homing pigeon metaphor, this article describes the distilling of decades of reading research into a message being…

Seminal studies on negation revealed that negative sentences are difficult to process, as they require an extra mental step. Similarly, at the discourse level, concession has been repeatedly shown to be more complex than other relations such as result because it implies the denial of an inference. The affinity between negation and concession…

In this article, we report on a cross-age peer learning program, the Martha's True Stories Reading Buddies program, focused on supporting the vocabulary and comprehension of multilingual learners and their peers in elementary school. We describe the principles of the program and provide information about our evaluation of the program. Then, we…

This study examined reading tutors' interpretation of reading progress-monitoring graphs. A think-aloud procedure was used to evaluate tutors at two points in time, before and after a year of service as an AmeriCorps reading tutor. During their service, the reading tutors received extensive training and ongoing coaching. Descriptive results showed…

Testing language abilities is common in the context of migration. It has been observed that approximately 6.2 million adults in Germany are low literate and that approximately 47% of this group does not have German as their L1. Similar findings have been reported for other modern Western societies with compulsory schooling and a well-developed…

Research has demonstrated that computer assisted instruction (CAI) can have positive impacts on various literacy skills, however its impact on specific comprehension skills is currently unclear. This study employed a small-scale randomized control trial to examine the impact of a researcher-developed adaptive computer assisted instructional…

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

This correlational study investigated the direct and indirect relationships derivational morphology had to reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority students in the fifth-grade. It also investigated the direct and indirect effects Spanish phonological awareness had on reading comprehension. Multivariate path analysis was used to…

Previous studies indicate that children are exposed to different literacy experiences at home. Although these disparities have been shown to affect children's literacy skills, it remains unclear whether and how home literacy practices influence brain activity underlying word-level reading. In the present study, we asked parents of French children…

This research is based on a casual-comparative design which determined the effect classroom structure had on the Black males' reading achievement. The quantitative study investigated potential differences between self-contained and departmentalized classroom organization on Black males' Grade 4 language scores on the Mississippi Curriculum Test,…