A highly practical resource for the classroom, this book offers clear, research-based recommendations for helping students at all grade levels understand and learn from what they read. Explaining the skills and strategies that good readers use to comprehend text, the authors show how to support struggling students in developing these skills. They…

Presents the results of two studies where children were taught to identify textual cues, syntactic and semantic, in order to locate main ideas. The children also built graphic representations of these structures and were taught relevant questions to ask regarding comprehension. Results showed significant improvement, especially with older…

Describes a long-term project where middle school students were taught to visually represent key text ideas through idea-mapping techniques. Instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum along with regular textbooks and supplementary material. Positive effects were found in recall, comprehension, and learning. (MJP)