With a focus on content-area reading, this study aimed to (a) understand the sources and prevalence of concurrent and specific difficulties in word-level skills, vocabulary, and knowledge among adolescent struggling readers (ASRs) and (b) explore the relations among reading skills, profiles, and reading comprehension. A dual-measure screening…

This report describes a research-practice partnership project between researchers and a group of Years 7 and 8 teachers from schools serving diverse communities throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. The schools represented in the study were demographically and geographically diverse and served urban, mixed, and rural communities in the North and South…

The question posed in this analysis is: What is the relationship between text-centered dialogue and reading comprehension? This article examines one student's behaviors while reading challenging texts. This qualitative case study explored the verbal behaviors of Robert (pseudonym), a seventh-grade student receiving reading intervention. As his…

The ability to comprehend science texts is not only an academic skill but a life skill. Currently, however, the majority of students across grade levels in the United States are reading below grade level "and" have science achievement below grade level. The text structure strategy, a reading comprehension strategy in which students are…

The purpose of this research is to develop a vocabulary assessment, Evaluation of Academic Vocabulary or "EAV," that gauges students' depth of knowledge of academic words and is sensitive to vocabulary growth in the context of literacy interventions. We report results from two studies with native English-speaking middle school students…

Adolescent readers require a broad range of reading skills to deal with the challenges of reading complex text. Some researchers argue for a discipline-specific focus to address the low reading proficiency rates among secondary students. Disciplinary literacy attends to the different ways disciplines, such as science, generate and communicate…

Component skills and discourse frameworks of reading have identified characteristics of readers and texts that influence comprehension. However, these 2 frameworks have not previously been integrated in a comprehensive and systematic way to explain performance on any standardized assessment of reading comprehension that is in widespread use across…

In a longitudinal design, we measured 50 low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension development from Grades 7 to 9. There were 24 native Dutch and 26 language minority students. In addition, we assessed the roles of (a) linguistic knowledge, (b) metacognitive knowledge, and (c) reading fluency in predicting both the level and growth of…

Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers' comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers' beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers'…

Various sequences for teaching genetics have been proposed. Three seventh-grade biology textbooks in Taiwan share similar key knowledge assemblages but have different knowledge arrangements. To investigate the influence of knowledge arrangements on student understanding of genetics, we compared students' reading comprehension of the three texts…

The purpose of this report is to describe the technical qualities of the 2018-2019 operational administration of the English language arts/literacy (ELA/L) and mathematics summative assessments in grades 3 through 8 and high school. The ELA/L assessments focus on reading and comprehending a range of sufficiently complex texts independently and…

The purpose of this report is to describe the technical qualities of the 2018-2019 operational administration of the English language arts/literacy (ELA/L) and mathematics assessments in grades 3 through 8 and high school. New Meridian, in coordination with multiple states and vendors, developed an alternate form of the summative assessment to…

The integration of knowledge during reading was tested in 1,109 secondary school students. Reading times for the second sentence in a pair (Jane's headache went away) were compared in conditions where the first sentence was either causally or temporally related to the first sentence (Jane took an aspirin vs. Jane looked for an aspirin).…

A conceptualization of reading as an interaction of constrained and unconstrained skills formed the theoretical basis for this correlational analysis of adolescents' orthographic knowledge. We hypothesized that orthographic development (as measured by spelling ability) would serve as a link between constrained and unconstrained reading skills in…

We tested the effects of teaching reading skills through U.S. History content for 38 eighth-grade poor readers whose reading ability ranged from 2nd to 4th grade levels. Half of the students received special education services and half of the students were English Language Learners. Students were taught to decode multisyllabic words, learn…