This article introduces the Main Idea Strategy, a strategy to improve the performance of students with disabilities and students who perform poorly on reading comprehension tasks. The rationale, research background, and detailed implementation information are presented.

Many students struggle to maintain the attention needed to comprehend while reading. One 4th-grade student and 5th-grade student, both with poor comprehension and attention-related disabilities, were taught to use a proven systematic reading comprehension strategy, TWA (Think Before Reading, Think While Reading, Think After Reading), when reading…

Newman (1977, 1983) defined five specific literacy and numeracy skills as crucial to performance on mathematical word problems: reading, comprehension, transformation, process skills, and encoding. Newman's Error Analysis (NEA) provided a framework for considering the reasons that underlay the difficulties students experienced with mathematical…

This article describes how Fayetteville State University's Reading Across the Curriculum (RAC) model developed for use with underprepared students can effectively improve the literacy and academic language skills of those students. The primary goals and objectives of the RAC program are to train faculty members from various disciplines to create…

Two national studies of Americans' changing reading habits, published by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), quantified the grounds for concerns that college and university educators have expressed in recent years based on their own anecdotal evidence from observing students. "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in…

The author remembers a class when he asked his students to discuss in small groups how Edgar Allan Poe suggests a judgment of the main character in "The Cask of Amontillado". During their discussion it became clear to the author that the students couldn't come to consensus because they had no grasp of the narrator's explanations of his motivations…

Included here are two appendixes to "Adult Education Literacy Instruction: A Review of the Research." Appendix A, "Adult Studies," contains: (1) Assessment Profiles; (2) Alphabetics; (3) Fluency; (4) Vocabulary; and (5) Comprehension. Appendix B, "Adolescent Studies," contains: (1) Alphabetics; (2) Fluency; (3) Vocabulary; and (4) Comprehension.…

Teacher knowledge and instructional expertise have been found in correlational and pre- and post-test studies to be related to student reading achievement. This article summarizes data presented in this special issue and additional research to address four questions: (a) What do expert reading teachers know? (b) Why do teachers need to acquire…

An easily-implemented instructional innovation that improved reading comprehension for students including striving readers, average readers, and advanced readers is described in this article. START (Students and Teachers Actively Reading Text) was developed to improve reading comprehension instruction and achievement. This innovative instructional…

The authors investigated absolute and relative metacomprehension accuracy as a function of verbal ability in college students. Students read hard texts, revised texts, or a mixed set of texts. They then predicted their performance, took a multiple-choice test on the texts, and made posttest judgments about their performance. With hard texts,…

"Effective Reading" (ER) is a community college course designed to help developmental readers succeed in college reading through improved reading comprehension. The course is based on current research which indicates that successful comprehension can take place if students follow three steps: predicting (pre-reading strategies such as surveying…

As a part of the teacher licensure program at the graduate level at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), the M.Ed. Licensure candidate is required to complete an action research project during a 3-semester-hour course that coincides with the 9-semester-hour student teaching experience. This course, Education 590 Culminating…