Twenty-first-century students require support beyond the traditional confines of public K-12 education. Students are arriving at the doors of schools with challenges outside of the learning environment that impact their ability to achieve academic success. This dissertation conducts a program evaluation of a multimodal intervention program at a…

Achieving an in-depth understanding of unfamiliar science concepts has been found to be difficult when learners can not index science language to relevant sensorimotor experiences. Ongoing research in embodied cognition highlights the importance of relevant sensorimotor experiences in understanding and learning new information. Aiming to foster…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of reading modality (oral versus silent) and passage genre (narrative versus expository) on the reading comprehension of middle school students. A normative sample of sixth- and seventh-grade students (N = 175) read narrative and expository texts from the Qualitative Reading Inventory,…

This study takes theories and perspectives from social semiotics, multimodality, sociocultural developmental perspective, social constructivism in science education, and second language acquisition to examine the science discourse in a sixth grade sheltered classroom. The study aims to answer the following two questions: 1. what is the nature of…