The problem in the 21st Century Community Learning Center (CCLC) afterschool program was that 40% of the students enrolled performed below the proficiency level in reading on the state assessed exams during the past 3 school years. This was of great concern for the teachers and administrators in this Title I middle school, Grades 6-8. This…

This study examined the extent to which prior beliefs and reading instructions impacted elements of a reader's mental representation of multiple texts. College students' beliefs about childhood vaccinations were assessed before reading two anti-vaccine and two pro-vaccine texts. Participants in the experimental condition read for the purpose of…

Educational research is ubiquitous; however, agreement on best practices is not. Although parents, teachers, students, and communities have a vested interest in students' success, varying practices of what is taught, how it is taught, and to whom it is taught are still debated. This study expands upon work done by Dr. Scott Wurdinger and Dr. Ron…

The link between vocabulary knowledge acquisition and its effect on reading comprehension has been well established over years of research; however, students from low income backgrounds may have less access to the opportunities that allow for the building of this vocabulary knowledge prior to and including entry into formal schooling. Therefore,…

The purpose of this embedded multiple case study was to explore perceptions of reading comprehension interventions in students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at public schools within the Commonwealth of Virginia and to discover common themes and strategies that help students with ASD. The sample pool consisted of approximately 62 students.…

Contemporary scholars, educators, and practitioners continue to engage in robust debates about how to research and practice philosophy with children and adolescents and how to theorize its foundational concepts. With a view to promoting such scholarly argumentation, this essay considers issues addressed by Wendy Turgeon and Thomas E. Wartenberg in…

We investigate the association of short- and long-range recurrences (speech connectedness) with age, education, and reading and writing habits (RWH) in typical aging using an oral narrative production task. Oral narrative transcriptions were represented as word-graphs to measure short- and long-range recurrences. Speech connectedness was explained…

The author takes the experience of book challenges as an opportunity for positive curricular changes by walking readers through the development of a formalized procedure for selecting new, diverse texts to add to the English Language Arts (ELA) program curriculum. The text-selection committee arrived at a six-step method: (1) Identify Desired…

Studies have suggested that multiple features influence letter knowledge across different orthographies. Arabic offers a unique opportunity to investigate the relations of letter properties on letter knowledge, but research on Arabic letter knowledge is scarce. This study was designed to investigate (a) letter frequency, (b) letter sequence, (c)…

Understanding the learning profiles of children, when teaching reading, affects the progress of their reading, in particular for children with Down syndrome. Specifically teaching word recognition, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and comprehension, while understanding the ways in which children with Down syndrome learn, will…

Students who struggle with reading have particular trouble with expository text. Instruction in text structures has been shown to be effective for improving expository reading comprehension. However, few studies have been conducted specifically with upper elementary aged struggling readers. To address these issues, we developed a new intervention,…

This article describes how secondary teachers might implement readers theater in their classrooms. In addition to reading fluency, this five-day format also explicitly targets reading comprehension and vocabulary. Each day of the week requires students to engage in various activities aimed to develop diverse components of reading as well as…

In this study, we investigate the effect of reading purpose on students' processing behavior during a reading comprehension test. In a repeated measures design, sixty undergraduates answered multiple-choice (MC) reading comprehension questions in a condition with no overarching goal for reading "and" in an alternate condition where the…

This study examined the use of sequenced visual images (graphic novels and comic books) to scaffold incidental vocabulary learning and text comprehension while processing visual and textual information. Due to the recent growth of graphic novels as a popular text format, empirical investigation is needed to ascertain its value and to possibly…

Students who struggle with reading have particular trouble with expository text. Instruction in text structures has been shown to be effective for improving expository reading comprehension. However, few studies have been conducted specifically with upper elementary aged struggling readers. To address these issues, we developed a new intervention,…