Using as a case study the experience of teaching Jane DeLynn's "Leash" (2002), a "pornosophical" novel about a sadomasochistic lesbian relationship, I argue in this essay for the pedagogical value of shock. I argue that shocking works of pornography can unsettle not only students' comfortable understandings of sexuality, but…

Given prior work identifying sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization as key strategies needed to learn from multiple texts, this study examines students' multiple text processing and written response composition under three different heuristic conditions. In particular, students were asked to engage in sourcing, corroboration, or…

Soares, Lages, Oliveira, and Cabrera-Hernández (2019) recently showed that the mirror-letter interference effect observed for words containing reversal letters was reliable for words containing left-oriented mirror-letters as 'd', but not for words containing right-oriented mirror-letters as 'b', thus indicating that the directionality of the…

Recent media reports suggest that teachers and teacher educators are using the three-cueing system model to justify an overemphasis on context to help students read unfamiliar words. In this conceptual article, the authors argue that although these critiques are exaggerated, the current climate provides an opportunity for teacher educators to…

Planning intervention for narrative comprehension deficits requires a thorough understanding of a child's skill in all component domains. The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of three methods of measuring pre-readers' event knowledge, an important predictor of story comprehension. Thirty-eight typically developing children (12…

The aim of this paper is two-fold. The first aim is to review the core representational and processing aspects of influential accounts of single-document and multiple-document comprehension with a particular emphasis on how readers negotiate conflicting information during reading. This review provides the groundwork for the second aim--to expand…

Given limited work modeling the role of individual difference factors and processing variables in students' learning from multiple texts, the author evaluates such a model. In particular, the model analyzed examines the relation between cognitive (i.e., habits with regard to information evaluation) and affective (i.e., interest) individual…

Background: Drawing on theories of purposeful reading, this study explored task conditions that support fifth graders' selective reading of documents in order to answer questions. More specifically, we investigated whether promoting students' elaboration of their task model increases task performance. Methods: Participants had to answer series of…

Visual information conveyed by a speaking face aids speech perception. In addition, children's ability to comprehend visual-only speech (speechreading ability) is related to phonological awareness and reading skills in both deaf and hearing children. We tested whether training speechreading would improve speechreading, phoneme blending, and…

With increasing social media attacks on scholarship and individual academics, educators must be prepared to talk to their students openly about skewed threats from the ideological right. This assignment opens up dialogue against such attacks by introducing core tenets of information literacy in conversation with an instructor's academic work. The…

The authors, university instructors, when confronted with extreme time constraints in a summer course during the COVID-19 pandemic, redesigned their course structure prioritizing their values and goals. Intentional choices provide teacher candidates with time together to slow down and interact more fully in a read-aloud centered, writer's…

The aim of this paper is two-fold. The first aim is to review the core representational and processing aspects of influential accounts of single-document and multiple-document comprehension with a particular emphasis on how readers negotiate conflicting information during reading. This review provides the groundwork for the second aim--to expand…

This qualitative teacher -- research study investigates how secondary students in English classes might use art materials and the construction of abstract artworks to explore, develop, and express their responses to and interpretations of literary works. The study was guided by the following research questions: 1. What happens when students are…

This dissertation studied the social and emotional learning competencies found within the Caldecott Medal Award winning texts from 1994 through 2019. Social and emotional learning took root in the 1990s and is now part of mainstream culture in schools across the United States. Research has been completed on the effects of social and emotional…

Comprehenders encounter a variety of syntactic structures through reading or spoken conversation. In some cases, sentences can be ambiguous and have more than one meaning. In "The spy saw the cop with the binoculars," one interpretation is that the spy is looking through the binoculars, while an alternative is that the cop has the…