This study examines the Sudanese EFL students' comprehension performance and measures the differences in their performance according to gender. After one semester of participation in extensive reading, 300 secondary school students from 15 schools in the state of Khartoum are randomly selected for the study. A comprehension test followed by a…

Due to emotions' evaluative nature, they provide a lens for understanding personal and urgent engagement with events and experiences. Grounding this work in ethnography and sociolinguistics, I utilized discourse analysis to study the emotions of 30 preservice elementary teachers expressed about climate change in a science course. I describe the…

Topic-specific didactical design research provides means not only to investigate how to learn but also what to learn, i.e., for specifying learning contents by analyzing students' comprehension processes in detail. This important characteristic of didactical design research is exemplarily shown for students' difficulties in finding symbolic…

The purpose of this study was to characterize students' self-assessments when reading mathematical texts, in particular regarding what students use as a basis for evaluations of their own reading comprehension. A total of 91 students read two mathematical texts, and for each text, they performed a self-assessment of their comprehension and…

One of the most frequent problems in reading comprehension is the difficulty in making inferences from the text, especially for students with mild disabilities (i.e., children with learning disabilities or with high-functioning autism). It is essential, therefore, that educators include the teaching of reading strategies to improve their students'…

Background: Research has shown substantial belief change as a result of reading text and the pervasive influence of prior belief in the evaluation of short arguments. Both outcomes have been attributed to the depth to which the text or the argument has been processed. This study brings together critical thinking and text comprehension research by…

In the present study, we assessed students' metacomprehension knowledge and examined the components of knowledge most related to comprehension of expository texts. We used the Revised Metacomprehension Scale (RMCS) to investigate the relations between students' metacomprehension knowledge and comprehension performance. Students who evaluated and…

The goal of this study was to tease apart the roles of phonological awareness (pA) and phonological short-term memory (pSTM) in sentence comprehension, sentence production, and word reading. Children 6- to 10-years of age (N = 377) completed standardized tests of pA ("Elision") and pSTM ("Nonword Repetition") from the…

The ability to identify the main idea through close reading of informational text is a higher-level skill students develop in elementary grades as a foundation for the acquisition of other critical skills in later grades. This article provides instructional strategies for this important skill as well as for improving reading comprehension.

Students engage in higher-order thinking as they read complex texts and perform complex reading-related tasks. However, the most consequential assessments, high-stakes tests, are currently limited in providing information about students' higher-order thinking. In this article, we describe higher-order thinking in relation to reading. We provide a…

According to recently published national standards, elementary students should engage in engineering design activities. This article outlines ways that teachers can use literacy instruction to support young students' engineering design activity, such as by selecting texts in which characters face problems that can be solved through engineering,…

In response to the ACTFL's Research Priorities Initiative, the present study used a multiple case study design to examine teacher candidates' ability to implement two high-leverage teaching practices: increasing interaction and target language comprehensibility and questioning to build and assess student understanding. Candidates implemented these…

In two experiments, we compared effects of instructions that encourage learners to create referential connections between words and pictures with instructions that distract learners from creating referential connections. In Experiment 1, students read a scientific text under four conditions. In the text-picture condition, students read the…

Background: A number of studies have suggested that language in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may not be simply delayed compared with language in typically developing (TD) children, but deviant. The deviance has been detected in the comprehension of pronouns, and it has triggered proposals for the existence of a specific syntactic deficit in…

The aim of this research was to investigate how undergraduate students conceptualise feedback, and compare this with research into conceptions of teaching and learning related phenomena in higher education. Using a phenomenographic approach, 28 physiotherapy students in New Zealand were interviewed about their experiences. Data analysis resulted…