Background: The purpose of this study was to examine how skilled adolescent readers draw on their prior knowledge of multimodality and narrative text structure when navigating an intentionally designed digital narrative text. We know that skilled middle-school readers have been taught narrative text structure and that adolescents who use the…

This study examined whether or not fourth-graders could fully demonstrate their writing skills on the computer and factors associated with their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) computer-based writing assessment. The results suggest that high-performing fourth-graders (those who scored in the upper 20 percent…

Social networking can currently be described as a mainstream youth activity, with almost half of 8-17-year-old children, who have access to the Internet, claiming to participate. As an activity it is of particular interest to literacy educators because it is enacted through the production and consumption of text. However, a growing body of…

In the study, we investigated effects of 2 different versions of a web-based tutoring system to provide 5th-grade students with strategy instruction about text structure, which was an intervention to improve reading comprehension. The design feature assessed varied in individualization of instruction (individualized or standard). The more…

This study investigated the effects of different versions of Web-based instruction focused on text structure on fifth- and seventh-grade students' reading comprehension. Stratified random assignment was employed in a two-factor experiment embedded within a pretest and multiple posttests design (immediate and four-month delayed posttests). The two…