Purpose: Many PhD students have strong reading comprehension, but some struggle with how to read critically. The purpose of this study is to understand what reading looks like for PhD students, what they are doing when they read scholarly texts and how they bring these texts to life in meaningful ways. Design/methodology/approach: The authors…

In this study, we investigated the literacy practices of undergraduate calculus students and non-mathematics STEM faculty members as they read excerpts from a calculus textbook. We found several differences in their practices that appeared to be tied to the didactical nature of the excerpts and the participants' identities and power relationships…

This study analyzes the effect of text-inserted questions and post-text-reading questions, i.e., questions timing, on students' processing and learning when studying challenging texts. Seventy-six freshmen read two science texts and answered ten adjunct questions with the text available, being tested on learning 5 days afterwards. Questions were…

In this exploratory case study, the authors employed an "interpretive communities" lens to investigate the ways in which 12 high school English teachers of one district read and reasoned with literary works. Primary data sources were verbal protocol interviews and semistructured interviews. Analysis revealed that the focal teachers…

This convergent mixed-methods study investigated what urban fourth-grade students self-reported for navigating multimodal science books. Reported strategies included general reading processes, clarifying understanding, selecting portions to read, choosing an order to read the text, and interpreting the process in the text. A range of metacognitive…

Purpose: The purposes of this study is to expand on previous work in English language arts (ELA) disciplinary literacy and to unpack literary text reading processes across three different participant groups. Design/methodology/approach: The authors recruited literary scholars and first-year college students to read literary texts aloud and voice…

Students face challenging texts and concepts across the disciplines in higher education, and many students lack the reading skills and strategies to make sense of them. The aim of the small study described in this article was to explore the benefits, if any, of the difficulty paper, a written formative assessment that asks students to explore…

Reading comprehension of informational texts has been largely debated and introduced at all levels of education across western countries. However, it has not received enough attention in developing countries including Vietnam. This paper aims to investigate the procedure of reading and comprehension of informational texts in high schools in…

The current study examined the relations among key variables that underlie reading comprehension of expository science texts in a diverse population of adult native English readers. Using Mechanical Turk to sample a range of adult readers, the study also examined the effect of text presentation on readers' comprehension and knowledge structure…

The primary purpose of this study was to explore not only the effects of epistemic beliefs in science on science-text reading but also the gender differences in epistemic beliefs and the reading process. The interactions between gender and epistemic beliefs during reading were also explored. A total of 25 university students, 13 male and 12…

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…

This qualitative case study explored two Chinese international graduate students' beliefs about their reading and reading processes. The researcher interviewed the participants, asked them to read aloud, analyzed their reading using miscue analysis, and then discussed their reading with them using retrospective miscue analysis (RMA). The…

Students face challenging texts in higher education, whether they are discipline-specific journal articles or great works of literature. Building on research in content area reading and disciplinary literacy, this case study explores the various stances undergraduate honors students take when coping with challenging texts while enrolled in a…

Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers' comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers' beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers'…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have increased expectations for stakeholders (students, teachers, teacher educators) to gain knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to discipline-specific ways of reading and writing. Despite the increased rigor, implementation of disciplinary literacy practices varies widely by content, grade level, and…