The purpose of the current mixed-methods study was to investigate the effectiveness of a traditional and novel knowledge activation technique for supporting fifth and sixth graders' comprehension of exposition covering unfamiliar content. For the quantitative portion, 149 rural middle-school students were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions:…

This study compared the effects of two brief prereading instructional practices--hands-on activities and prior knowledge activation--on sixth-graders' intrinsic motivation for reading a text and reading comprehension. Both hands-on activities and prior knowledge activation substantially improved reading comprehension relative to a control…

Providing instruction to students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be challenging for teachers since students can have a range of unique learning needs, particularly in reading comprehension. Given that reading comprehension is a complex process requiring the use of various knowledge and skills simultaneously, many students with ASD often…

The "Pathway to Academic Success Project" trains teachers to improve the reading and writing abilities of English learners (ELs) who have an intermediate level of English proficiency by incorporating cognitive strategies into reading and writing instruction. This What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) intervention report, part of the WWC's…

The "Pathway to Academic Success Project" trains teachers to improve the reading and writing abilities of English learners (ELs) who have an intermediate level of English proficiency by incorporating cognitive strategies into reading and writing instruction. This What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) intervention report, part of the WWC's…

The "Pathway to Academic Success Project" trains teachers to improve the reading and writing abilities of English learners (ELs) who have an intermediate level of English proficiency by incorporating cognitive strategies into reading and writing instruction. The cognitive strategies include goal setting, tapping prior knowledge, asking…

Failure to "activate" relevant, existing background knowledge may be a cause of poor reading comprehension. This failure may cause particular problems with inferences that depend heavily on prior knowledge. Conversely, teaching how to use background knowledge in the context of gap-filling inferences could improve reading comprehension in…

It is easy for intermediate students to get the wrong ideas about the purpose of reading. Educators pay so much attention to decoding and fluency in the early years that children sometimes come to believe that flawless and rapid word recognition is the point. As texts get more demanding or unfamiliar, some of the "good readers" in classes begin to…

The purpose of this practice brief is to provide schools, districts, and states with background knowledge about best practices for older students who struggle to read. It focuses on the reading skills that adolescents need to more fully access content-area curricula and, in turn, secure a productive future. The authors define adolescent reading as…

In this article, the author shares her experience in teaching sixth grade Spanish at Autrey Mill Middle School in Alpharetta, Georgia. Through the school's implementation of the middle school teaming concept, the author and her colleague on the sixth grade team have teamed up with other teachers in order to provide reading and writing…

The purpose of these two studies was to redirect interest to the Neurological Impress Method, a multisensory approach to reading instruction that occurs between a teacher and a student, which has been largely forgotten in mainstream and special education circles over the past decades. In addition to its emphasis on oral reading, we included a…