Selecting and remembering the necessary information from rapidly increasing information requires summarization skills. Research on improving students' summarization skills has focused on deletion, generalization, and reconstruction strategies. However, direct teaching of these strategies does not yield successful results. For this reason,…

Students with high reading proficiency typically achieve better results in science assessments, indicating the importance of reading proficiency. Since the process of reading is a complex interaction between properties of a text and a reader, the linguistic demands of a text might affect text comprehension. Certain linguistic features, such as…

Purpose: Complex features of science texts present idiosyncratic challenges for middle grade readers, especially in a post-Common Core educational world where students' learning is dependent on understanding informational text. The primary aim of this study was to explore how middle school readers process science texts and whether such…

Many studies have demonstrated the facilitating role of rhetorical devices in text comprehension, but there are also studies where rhetorical devices have not shown such effect. The present study sets out to explore whether readers' knowledge of rhetorical devices (that is, rhetorical competence) moderates their effectiveness beyond general…

The current study is a contribution to reading research dealing with tuition in reading comprehension and specifically with the issue of arranging tuition to support the development of metacognition. The empirical findings referred to in this study are from textual discussions of works of fiction in grades 6 and 7. The specific focus of the study…

The current study models reader, item, and word contributions to the lexical representations of 39 morphologically complex words for 172 middle school students using a crossed random-effects item response model with multiple outcomes. We report 3 findings. First, results suggest that lexical representations can be characterized by separate but…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how literature discussion affects middle school struggling readers. The focus was on 16 middle school struggling readers in a rural Title I school in the southeastern United States. Findings indicated that (a) literature discussion increased student enjoyment of reading, and (b) students…

Close reading is an instructional practice that has gained attention of late. It involves reading a complex text, annotation, and repeatedly reading to answer text-dependent questions. Although there are a number of recommendations for the use of close reading, there has not been a systematic analysis of student or teacher perceptions of this…

Text comprehension plays a fundamental role in the processes of acquisition, sharing, and construction of knowledge. Most definitions share the focus on the interaction between text and reader's prior knowledge. In this paper both direct and indirect effects of prior knowledge on reading comprehension have been analyzed, along with other…

Children ages 2-18 spend between two and four hours per day watching TV, a calculation that is even higher if DVDs, videos and the Internet are included. Although the amount of television watched by today's children has raised concerns about their literacy development, captions could hold a key to turning television into an educational asset.…

This investigation explored relationships between format of text (electronic or print-based) and reading comprehension of adolescent readers. Also in question were potential influences on comprehension from related measures including academic placement of participants, gender, prior knowledge of the content, and overall reading ability. Influences…

When the author asked her eighth-grade students to list some reading strategies, they were well prepared to answer her. But when she asked them how they knew they did not understand what they were reading--in other words, how they knew they need to use these reading strategies--they were unable to produce an explanation. She launched an action…

Research suggests that children's understanding of text can be improved by the explicit teaching of those comprehension strategies that are used implicitly by skilled readers, particularly the use of self-regulating strategies to generate questions about text. This study of the teaching of comprehension in 51 London Key Stage 2 classrooms explores…

Two dimensions of students' beliefs about meaning construction in reading processes, transmission and transaction beliefs, were studied. According to transmission beliefs, the reader's task is to understand the author's intended meaning, while transaction beliefs assign to the reader the role of active meaning constructor. Students' beliefs were…

Previous research has established that interest in a text is related to better comprehension and recall, but the impact of interest on comprehension in testing situations has not been widely investigated. This study used Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) to examine the relationship between students' interest in reading passages and their…