In this article, Abby Reisman offers four instructional practices that educators can use to help students grapple with history's contradictions and engage in meaningful text-based discussions. Reisman details two suggestions that can be used in history classrooms and across the disciplines: orient students to one another and orient students to the…

Teaching learners how to comprehend text remains a largely unsuccessful attempt in our school system. Drawing from the fields of learning sciences, education, instructional design, and performance improvement, we designed, tested, revised, and released to schools and homes an interactive online program that reliably teaches flexible, widely…

Supporting the reading development of college students is the responsibility of all professors. As experts in the field, with experience navigating and interpreting readings in a particular discipline, professors are obligated to think of themselves as master artisans apprenticing their students to the craft of reading. Texts in all subject areas…

In preparation for her school's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Elizabeth Brown developed an integrated language arts and social studies one-week unit of study on the civil rights movement, where she reinforced reading, writing, and speaking skills. The overarching goals for the five-day lesson on Dr. King's "I Have a…

Students are challenged to pass mandated tests in grades three through eight and the exit test on the secondary school level in order to be promoted to the next higher grade level or to receive a high school diploma. Failure is certainly a negative experience. It behooves reading teachers to assist learners to attach meaning to what is being…

Digital learning environments are generally composed of resources that cumulatively meet some specified educational objective, with each resource facilitating the acquisition of a subset of the concepts to be learned. In such contexts narrative has, for example, been used to support the understanding and navigation of a course or curriculum…

The paper focuses on principles for the design of school activities involving the collective reading of multiple texts. We show that the collective reading of multiple texts has been practiced in rare occasions in Western history. Scrutiny of the reasons for the persistence and the decline of this practice in different societies suggests that it…

This paper examines some of the theoretical and practical problems associated with the use of hypertext as a medium for teaching, and explores the positive role that it may be able to play in teaching materials. Hypertext is conventionally described as non-linear, and this aspect of non-linearity is interpreted as endowing it with many attractive…

Applying reading and writing theory to cases in composition, this chapter troubleshoots assignments that produced disappointing results and illustrates how the model of the "ill-structured problem" can help writing instructors craft assignments that foster the cognitive and affective maturation essential to college-level literacy. (Contains 2…