This article is located at the crossroads between two distinctive human traits, empathy and rational thought, with narrative emerging as a particularly powerful means to enable young readers to bring them together. Specifically, we discuss the role that critical literary exegesis plays in the development of empathic consciousness in literary…

The reading framework for the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) presents the assessment's conceptual base and discusses its content. The framework describes the types of texts and questions that should be included in the assessment, as well as how the questions should be designed and scored. This report provides highlights of…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

New media, new knowledge practices, and concepts point to the need for greater understanding of cognitive processes underlying knowledge acquisition and generation in open informational worlds. The authors of the articles in this special issue address cognitive and instructional challenges surrounding multiple document comprehension--a…

This article highlights four cognitive processes key to online reading comprehension and how one might begin to transform existing think-aloud strategy models to encompass the challenges of reading for information on the Internet. Informed by principles of cognitive apprenticeship and an emerging taxonomy of online reading comprehension…

Every few years in the United States, history teachers go through what some believe is an embarrassing national ritual. A representative group of students sit down to take a standardized U.S. history test, and the results show varied success. Sizable percentages of students score at or below a "basic" understanding of the country's history.…

The study of literature has many important benefits for students, but research shows that students often have difficulty interpreting literary texts, are unable to read critically, and are challenged to write interpretations that go beyond basic plot summary. This article provides a theoretical interpretation of the processes by which students…

Offers a step-by-step procedure for teaching intermediate grade poor readers three important text-based strategies that boost their comprehension of expository prose by stimulating their thinking. (FL)

Arguing that computers can help college students make connections between reading and rhetorical theory and research by providing them with opportunities to read reflectively and rhetorically, this paper describes an ideal computer assisted reading component of a composition program. Following a brief introduction, the first section of the paper…

Revealing or visualizing the thinking involved in making clinical decisions is a challenge. A case study is presented with a visual implement for sharing the diagnostic process. This technique adapts the Bayesian approach to the case presentation. Pretest probabilities and likelihood ratios are gathered to obtain post-test probabilities of every…

Describes a summer program for prefreshman science students entering Xavier University, designed to develop their problem-solving and academic abilities by emphasizing the connection between reading comprehension and analytical skills. (MKM)

Thinking through Writing (TTW) was a project to develop, test, and disseminate a program for teaching thinking and writing skills in secondary school English and social studies courses. Each of the 12 schools participating in the project scheduled a group of students to take an English and a social studies course in the program, and two teachers…

Reading comprehension skills can be taught effectively across the curriculum leading to enhanced critical thinking and reading skills, as well as improved performance in content areas. Skilled readers plan their approach to the task at hand, monitor their learning as they read, apply strategies to foster learning, evaluate, and if necessary,…

The English courses at Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) are designed to challenge students in several areas: philosophy, linguistics, psychology, history, aesthetics, mythology, logic, and grammar. Although emphasis may vary from course to course, the goals in each remain the same: to teach reading and writing and the mental processes that…

Initial activities in a collaborative reading project for tenth graders were based on the categorizing process, which is the basis for understanding the structure of ideas in most textbooks. Ideas are organized in a hierarchy of related categories moving down from the title, through chapter headings, main headings, subheadings, to paragraphs.…