To promote independent reading in middle school, teachers must understand why adolescents choose to read or not read a specific book. Yet, there is limited research on the factors that students consider when evaluating books that teachers have introduced them to in class. This study aimed to describe factors that 43 Grade 7 and 8 students noted as…

Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to…

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…

The goal of this study was to determine the effect of setting a delay between reading a text and answering comprehension questions on "when"-to-search and "what"-to-search decisions in a task-oriented reading environment. Fifty-five eighth-grade students were randomly divided into two groups. One group read one text, answered…

In an eighth-grade English language arts class, 100 students used virtual reality headsets, augmented reality--capable smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, online scavenger hunts, and print-based texts as an introduction to William Shakespeare's life and works. The authors highlight the need for educators to offer multimodal instruction that…

Among the many factors contributing to the historical lack of reading gains of our Black male students is the absence of texts accurately and authentically representing African American characters in today's schools. In addition, well-meaning educators are not adept in identifying and selecting these types of texts in order to provide African…

Purpose: The purpose of this conceptual paper is to make the case for the value of fostering collaborative sensemaking in responding to literature. Drawing on examples of classroom interactions in 6th-, 8th-, 11th- and 12th-grade classrooms, it proposes methods for teachers to foster collaborative sensemaking. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing…

The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading. The students who participated in the study that the authors report on were eighth graders who…

This research replicates an earlier study and extends it by shifting instructional responsibility from researchers to special education teachers, who implemented reading instruction that included multisyllabic word decoding, academic vocabulary, and three comprehension strategies (generating main ideas, comparing and contrasting people and events,…

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…

How students ask questions as they learn has implications for understanding, retention, and problem solving. The current research investigates the influence of domain, age, and previous experience with content on the ways students approach questioning across history and science texts. In 3 experiments, 3rd-, 8th-, and 10th-grade students in large…

The author created a lesson in which students successfully practiced reading comprehension skills while developing an understanding of earthquakes. Not only did this lesson help students gain an understanding of the impact of earthquakes, a subject embedded into Missouri's eighth-grade science curriculum, but it also addresses one of the new…

This study examines the relationship between patterns of cognitive self-regulatory activities and the quality of texts produced by adolescent struggling writers (N = 51). A think-aloud study was conducted involving analyses of self-regulatory activities concerning planning, formulating, monitoring, revising, and evaluating. The study shows that…

This study investigated the reading behavior of 15-year-old students while reading texts and answering corresponding multiple-choice questions. The availability of the texts during question answering was manipulated experimentally. Allocation of resources to several cognitive processes at the word, sentence, and text level was measured by…

The goal of this study is to analyze the self-regulation processes present in task-oriented reading activities. In the 1st experiment, we examined the following self-regulation processes in the context of answering questions about an available text: (a) monitoring the comprehension of the question, (b) self-regulating the search process, and (c)…