Understanding the global water cycle is fundamental to Earth systems literacy and fostering an informed citizenry; however, students often struggle with terminology, the role of key processes, and estimating the physical and temporal scales, leaving knowledge gaps that impair comprehension. The Hydrologic Cycle Game is a pedagogical tool for…

Students often struggle with developing understanding from expository science texts. This study explored whether training students to engage in a POE (Predict-Observe-Explain) study strategy might be beneficial when learning from texts that introduce theories by describing experiments and empirical results, a common style in social science…

Learning from expository texts demands the processing of metatextual cues (rhetorical devices) and the activating of reading strategies. The main objective of this study was to examine whether profiting from written metatextual cues to launch reading strategies needs higher level of rhetorical competence than profiting from oral cues.…

Reading comprehension is not a skill someone learns and can then apply in different reading contexts. It is one of the most complex activities that readers engage in on a regular basis, and the ability to comprehend is dependent upon a wide range of knowledge and skills. Despite a common view about comprehension, several lines of enquiry have…

A key goal of recent reforms in science education has been to support students' collective sensemaking, in which they work together to understand a natural phenomenon. This work is often done during class discussions, but facilitating those discussions is challenging. In this study, we used a framework of three discussion types to investigate how…

Background: There is now substantial evidence that language interventions delivered to small groups can be effective for improving language skills and hence strengthening the foundation for formal schooling. However, there are remaining challenges when delivering such interventions in naturalistic environments at scale. Method: We reflect on three…

Some theories of sentence processing make a distinction between two kinds of meaning: a linguistic meaning encoded at the lexicon (i.e., selectional restrictions), and an extralinguistic knowledge derived from our everyday experiences (i.e., world knowledge). According to such theories, the former meaning is privileged over the latter in terms of…

In this paper, we explore the role of mathematical proof summaries as a tool for capturing students' reading comprehension of a given proof. We present an interview study based on mathematicians' pairwise evaluations of student-produced summaries of a proof demonstrating the uncountability of the open unit interval. We present a thematic analysis,…

Sentence comprehension requires both syntactic prediction and working memory processes. Evidence suggests that both are impaired in agrammatic aphasia, and can independently contribute to comprehension breakdowns, but the relationship between them, especially during real-time sentence comprehension remains unclear. Two EEG studies investigated…

Several researchers examined reading interventions used with students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but few looked at teachers' perceptions of their abilities to select, implement, and assess reading interventions. The problem is that secondary teachers in a suburban Mid-Atlantic public high school acknowledge that they struggle with the…

This study examined how background knowledge activation impacted reading comprehension. Comparisons were made between discussion-based background knowledge activation, paired informational text background knowledge activation, and a control group. One-way ANOVAs discovered significant differences between the discussion group and the control group…

Text reading fluency refers to the ability to read connected texts with accuracy, speed, and expression (prosody), and has garnered substantial attention as an important skill for reading comprehension. However, two fundamental questions remain--the dimensionality of text reading fluency including text reading efficiency (accuracy and speed) and…

Text reading fluency refers to the ability to read connected texts with accuracy, speed, and expression (prosody), and has garnered substantial attention as an important skill for reading comprehension. However, two fundamental questions remain--the dimensionality of text reading fluency including text reading efficiency (accuracy and speed) and…

In-depth understanding of nature of science (NOS) moves beyond knowledge of discrete NOS aspects to consider connections among NOS aspects. This study presents three teacher cases pre to post a nature of science graduate course to explore the potential of an innovative analytic approach that focuses on the connections individual learners make…

Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) is an acquired neurological disorder primarily affecting physical and visual functioning. There is a lack of empirical evidence in the existing literature about the nature of speech, language, and cognitive deficits associated with NMOSD. Hence, this case study provides assessment information about a…