President Obama's 2009 speech in Prague is remembered as a call for the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. It reinvigorated a long-overdue policy debate in the United States and Europe. Unfortunately, that debate is characterized by a focus on arsenal size that borders on numerology, a lack of imagination consistent with presentism, and…

Acceptance and commitment therapy asserts that in clinical problems such as rumination and depression, making sense continues despite accompanying aversive consequences, because sense-making is reinforcing, particularly when it leads to experiential avoidance. The following series of experiments aimed to provide preliminary empirical evidence for…

Counterfactual statements such as "if Mary had cleaned the room, she would have moved the sofa" convey both actual and hypothetical actions, namely, that Mary did not clean the room or move the sofa, but she would have done so in some possible past situation. Such statements are ubiquitous in daily life and are involved in critical cognitive…

Words like "church" are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another…

We developed and evaluated an intervention that teaches reading comprehension via expository text structure training to second graders in urban public schools at risk for academic failure. Fifty lessons on 5 basic text structures (sequence, comparison, causation, description, and problem-solution) were embedded in a social studies curriculum that…

To explore the importance of text cohesion, we conducted two experiments. We measured online (reading times) and offline (comprehension accuracy) processes for texts that were high and low cohesion. In study one (n?=?60), we manipulated referential cohesion using noun repetition (high cohesion) and synonymy (low cohesion). Students showed enhanced…

We examined the role of justification for knowing beliefs in learning and comprehension when ethnic majority and ethnic minority students from the same school classes read five conflicting documents on the scientific issue of sun exposure and health. Results showed that the more ethnic minority students trusted scientific authorities and the less…

Nobuko Sakurai (2015) presents insightful research results that help educators better understand the impact of translation as it limits reading quantity, reading comprehension, and reading rate in an extensive reading (ER) program. Overall, the results of the study encourage educators to restrict translation as a means of obtaining better results…

This study examined personality similarity between teachers and their students and its impact on teacher judgement of student achievement in the domains of reading comprehension and mathematics. Personality similarity was quantified through intraclass correlations between personality characteristics of 409 dyads of German teachers and their…

This paper describes shadow-reading, a pedagogical technique aimed at fostering reading comprehension and retention in second (L2) or foreign language (FL) classrooms. The technique is an adaptation of "conversational shadowing," a procedure which requires listeners to repeat what their interlocutors say in an attempt to remember the…

Using "pedagogical design capacity" ("PDC") as the conceptual framework, this single-case study examines how an English teacher in Hong Kong perceives and mobilizes curriculum materials to teach reading comprehension to secondary one students in two stages of implementation. Relying on data collected from semi-structured…

This study evaluates the psychological reality of two sets of epistemic beliefs, or epistemic "worldviews", called "mechanism" and "organicism." One author who described these two worldviews, Stephen Pepper, hypothesised that they appear to possess domain-general characteristics. Although Pepper's ideas have had a…

A latent profile analysis of 323 economically and academically at-risk adolescent and young adult learners yielded two classes: an average literacy class (92%) and a low literacy class (8%). The class profiles significantly differed in their word reading and math skills, and in their processing speeds and self-reported learning disabilities. The…

Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling…

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between teacher perceptions and children's reading motivation, with specific attention to gender differences. The reading self-concept, task value, and attitude of 160 fifth and sixth graders were measured. Teachers rated each student's reading comprehension. Results showed that for boys,…