To investigate how readability affects the way adults who are learning to read evaluate health information, a mixed methods research study was designed based on a sociotechnical framework and using theories of everyday life information seeking. The study analyzed a corpus of consumer health information documents (N = 501) using the CohMetrix text…

We employed self-paced reading and event-related potential measures to investigate how adults of varying literacy levels use sentence context information when reading. Community-dwelling participants read strongly and weakly constraining sentences that ended with expected or unexpected target words. Skilled readers showed N400s that were graded by…

We employed self-paced reading and event-related potential measures to investigate how adults of varying literacy levels use sentence context information when reading. Community-dwelling participants read strongly and weakly constraining sentences that ended with expected or unex- pected target words. Skilled readers showed N400s that were graded…

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy (CCSS-ELA) were adopted by approximately forty states (though in some cases, with significant revisions). However, researchers are still trying to understand how teachers are implementing the CCSS-ELA at the ground level--that is, in actual ELA classrooms. The CCSS-ELA call for…

This paper reports a study of the reading strategies used by twelve Arabic-speaking undergraduates at a major Gulf university when reading texts in English. The procedure employed was a think-aloud protocol followed by a semi-structured interview. Three research questions were addressed: (a) What are the primary comprehension problems encountered…

We used a design-based research model to examine a historical literacy intervention in Grade 6 classrooms. This article describes the results across 2 separate instructional cycles and for students grouped into 4 categories: (a) high-achieving students (n = 23 and n = 24 for Cycle I and Cycle II, respectively), (b) average-achieving students (n =…

Teaching students to enjoy reading is important in middle level education; however, middle school students with emotional behavioral disabilities (EBD) frequently struggle with reading skills and frequently display motivational deficits during reading instruction. The purpose of this study was to examine if the presence/absence of a classroom pet…

In light of increasing mandates to incorporate close reading of primary source historical documents at the elementary level, this study explored the reading difficulty level of the US Constitution with preservice elementary teachers using a traditional cloze assessment procedure. While best practice pedagogy of social studies has long included…

Background: Readability tests are indicators that measure how easy a document can be read and understood. Simple, but very often ignored, readability statistics cannot only provide information about the level of difficulty of the readability of particular documents but also can increase an evaluator's credibility. Purpose: The purpose of this…

Early in the 20th century, educators began looking for scientific methods for matching texts with readers. Some of the best minds in education dedicated themselves to this task, including Edward L. Thorndike, William S. Gray, Ralph Tyler, Edgar Dale, Irving Lorge, and Jeanne S. Chall. The purpose of this book is to bring students of reading into…