Reading comprehension in the content areas is a challenge for many middle grade students. Text structure-based instruction has yielded positive outcomes in reading comprehension at all grade levels in small and large studies. The text structure strategy delivered via the web, called Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy…

Two experiments studied whether 110 first, third, and fifth graders' difficulties in detecting inconsistencies in text were related to their failure to represent inconsistent propositions in memory or failure to compare them although remembered. Shortcomings were related more to difficulties in forming mental representations than in comparing…

The comprehensibility, interestingness, familiarity, and memorability of concrete and abstract instructional texts were studied in 4 experiments involving 221 college students. Results indicate that concreteness (ease of imagery) is the variable overwhelmingly most related to comprehensibility and recall. Dual coding theory and schema theory are…