This paper presents a framework and methodology for designing learning goals targeted at what students need to know and be able to do in order to attain high levels of literacy and achievement in three disciplinary areas--literature, science, and history. For each discipline, a team of researchers, teachers, and specialists in that discipline…

Examines the application of reading process and writing process research in content area instruction. Provides a chart of characteristics and purposes for various writing formats, including outlining, notetaking, captions, news reports, scripts, and books of facts. (MM)

One of the major assumptions of recent reading research has been that what the reader sees in the text plays as heavily in deteriming comprehension as does what the author says in the text. Although most researchers have tended to infer the reader's contributions by noting the differences between text structure and recall structures, there have…

This report reviews traditional research on studying and supplements it with theory and research from other areas of education and psychology to obtain a clearer picture of the way people study. The state variable of the student's knowledge of the criterion task and the processing variables of encoding and of focusing attention are explored. Some…

Recognizing that top-level structure helps students find main ideas and recall important facts, this research review recommends teaching top-level structure from middle school through college. (HOD)

Reports findings of a study investigating the effects of three prereading activities--advance organizers, structured overviews/graphic organizers, and multivocabulary experiences--done both orally and in writing before a text reading assignment was given. (FL)

Describes a method to improve student comprehension of content area materials that involves three distinct readings, each followed by a progressively more detailed graphic overview of the content. (HTH)

Reading to learn mathematics forges a new synthesis of the traditional basics of reading and mathematics which aims at fostering critical thinking and may provide an instructional context within which students and teachers can work out meaningful conceptions of mathematics. Benefits of this synthesis of reading and mathematics include: (1)…

Analyzes the research on how readers use text patterns to understand writing and identifies five text patterns found in both school texts and work texts. (HOD)

Reports on the reading processes of seven research physicists using data gathered from a series of interviews and observations. Reveals reading processes permeated with individual purposes and schema. (FL)

A review of the literature on the relationship between reading ability and mathematical ability shows the process of reading mathematics to be very different from the process of reading English prose. (AEA)

Reviews previous research on the effects of signals (structural cues that announce or emphasize content or reveal content relationships) on readers' comprehension of expository prose. Concludes that inconsistent results are due to inadequate methodologies that fail to control for confounding variables, such as text length and difficulty, topic…

Many learning disabled secondary school students have difficulties with text organization in both subject area reading and expository writing. Problems may include difficulty in following the main ideas in text, recognizing the main text topics and their interrelationships, or recognizing the subordinate and superordinate ideas and examples.…

This paper focuses on methods to improve the reading abilities of college students. A list of five elements college instructors (who are not reading specialists) should establish in a content reading agenda is offered; (1) an instructional basis for the reading process which will work for them; (2) content literacy environments; (3) insights into…

Research on content area reading in English as a second language (ESL) has focused on the psycholinguistic and educational aspects of reading. Psycholinguistic research has found that reading comprehension is not solely a result of text variables such as sentence complexity and length or vocabulary, but is largely dependent on reader variables,…