Proficient reading comprehension provides an academic advantage for 21st century learners. However, students at the upper elementary level face increasingly challenging texts that require use of metacomprehension skills. Yet, there is a lack of formal instruction that assists students in practicing these metacomprehension skills in classrooms.…

The study compared the effects of a refutation text on comprehension and learning outcomes to those of a standard expository text. Undergraduate students with varying amounts of accurate and inaccurate prior knowledge read and recalled a refutation or an expository text about energy. Comprehension measures included the amount of text information…

Failure to "activate" relevant, existing background knowledge may be a cause of poor reading comprehension. This failure may cause particular problems with inferences that depend heavily on prior knowledge. Conversely, teaching how to use background knowledge in the context of gap-filling inferences could improve reading comprehension in…

This experimental study examined students' comprehension of challenging, ecologically valid, history text. We examined the benefits of the elaborative interrogation (EI) comprehension strategy and the main idea (MI) strategy when compared to an independent study (IS) control. This work extended previous research and explored the ecological…