Written for the busy practitioner by an experienced professional development consultant, writer, and speaker, "Literacy for Real" is a hands-on guide to meaningful reading across the content areas of math, science, and social studies in grades 6-12. It presents key information that addresses all types of 21st century literacy--visual, digital, and…

Describes elements to look for when reading four identifiable sections of a research report: background and literature review, methodology and procedures, analysis, findings or summary. Literature review as prologue to author's argument, choices in design of a study, research participants, choices involved in analysis, and implications of findings…

A technique for measuring comprehension of lengthy prose is presented. The "textual segmentation" procedure requires subjects to partition text into complete, meaningful units such as paragraphs, chapters, and books. Potential applications of textual segmentation include measurement of reading comprehension, readability, and criteria for…

This article suggests ways in which the consumer of educational research can critically evaluate research reports in terms of sample and methodology, design and statistical treatment, and results and interpretation. The reader is alerted to sources of deliberate and nondeliberate bias and to fallacious use and/or interpretation of statistics.…

Educators are provided with five suggestions for evaluating popular articles about learning disabilities. Suggestions include identifying the article's major focus, determining the perspective of the author, evaluating the theoretical soundness of the article, evaluating use of terminology, and evaluating the overall usefulness of the article. (DB)

Intended for teachers, this monograph encourages readers to consider the notion that thinking critically is a matter of reading signs, that it is the function of signs that makes reflective thinking possible. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "Beyond a Literal Reading"; (2) "Current Thinking on Critical Thinking";…

A classroom game designed to promote critical reading and critical thinking in the English as a second language (ESL) instructional setting is described. The game offers problems whose solutions require the use of language. Students are divided into teams facing a screen. They are shown a passage or dialogue while the teacher reads it aloud. Each…

Describes the use of student-generated questions to enhance learning in a freshman-level communication skills course. As class exercises, students were asked to develop questions about an assigned reading, to analyze the questions, and to map the questions to identify important textual elements and various levels of thinking about the text. (DMM)

These official scoring guide for reading/literature present details of the 6-point scoring system used in Oregon schools for the 1989-99 and 1999-2000 school years for grades 4-12. They list the attributes of students' responses to merit a score from 1 (lowest) to 6 (highest) in the areas of comprehension, extending understanding, reading…

This booklet, which is intended as a support to the delivery of professional development of Australian literacy educators on critical literacy, presents a seven-step systematic model of all contexts through which a text may be constructed and studied. The first two sections discuss the model's use as a comprehensive framework for future teaching,…

Describes an inservice technique that models for teachers how they can use the Directed Reading Thinking Activity to develop students' predictive strategies. (FL)

Focusing on better assessing the thinking, or meaning-making, aspects of reading that are emphasized in current views of the reading process, this book presents the Informal Reading-Thinking Inventory (IR-TI) which offers options to enhance assessment beyond assessing students' listening level, oral reading of words, and basic comprehension. The…

Based on classroom experience and grounded in current research in reading, learning theory, and cognitive psychology, this book presents practical approaches to helping secondary school students develop the ability to reason with facts and concepts. The book also focuses on inference and implication. The first part of the book explains and…

Noting that teaching the research paper seldom gets below surface conventions, this book surveys the work of key theorists in rhetoric, past and present, and seeks to change the way teachers and students think about the relationship between writers and readers. Focusing on theorists who see the creation of knowledge as a social process, the book…

Content area reading instruction includes two elements: the information presented in subject matter text, and the plan that teachers use to help students understand the content. According to research and interviews with social studies teachers, there is a high failure rate in the social studies content area because children have problems…