The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of students' background knowledge and how they utilized "don't know" affordances to comprehend and learn from text. In two studies, over 8,000 middle and high school students interacted with a content-area learning environment in which they answered a series of background…

As leisure-time reading among adolescents declines in the western world, stakeholders try to increase students' motivation for school-related reading. We examine the relationship of students' autonomous and controlled reading motivation with their amount and experiences of school-related reading in four school subjects, controlling for students'…

In this study, middle school language arts teachers engaged in focus group interviews and shared their perceptions of content literacy, experiential learning, assessment data, and refined practice prior to and after participating in a sustained content literacy professional development. Findings based on these perceptions demonstrate a need for…

There is a worldwide concern about science and engineering undergraduate students, particularly those who are English language learners, struggling with their entry-level content courses. From a teacher cognition perspective and drawing on semi-structured interviews with chemistry, mathematics and physics teachers at a university in the Middle…

The present study aimed to explore the relation between students' oral reading efficacy, reading comprehension, and academic performance on a nationwide high school placement exam (TEOG). The students were selected from a public middle school. The students' oral reading efficacy, comprehension, and TEOG achievement scores were obtained to figure…

This article describes the development of an assessment system for adolescent reading comprehension. It presents a research context--a reading intervention implemented in middle and high schools in an urban district--which became the impetus for the work. The article outlines the organizational principles of construct modeling that guided the…

This qualitative study investigated high school reading programs and participants focusing on the insider perspectives of teachers and their students. The study occurred in two sites, one in a Southern state and the other in an Eastern state. The participants, five high school reading teachers and two to three students in each of their reading…

This study explored the differential contribution of cognitive and motivational factors on the comprehension of an expository text in secondary school students. One hundred and fifty-five 7th and 8th grade students were assessed in prior knowledge, inferences, metacognition, reading motivation, topic interest, and reading comprehension of history…

This article discusses the various labels and definitions given for texts used for informational reading and writing and the confusion caused by the inconsistency of terms. An EBSCO search on articles published from 2006 to 2011 in the three largest literacy-related professional organizations' journals produced a total of 59 articles.…

The authors examined the role of an intervention designed to increase reading comprehension, reading self-efficacy beliefs, and engagement in social studies for middle school students of varying language backgrounds. Thirteen sixth- and seventh-grade teachers implemented the United States History for Engaged Reading (USHER) program with their…

In the social studies of science, visuals and graphical representations are theorized by means of the concept of inscription, a term that denotes all representations other than text inscribed in some medium including graphs, tables, photographs, and equations. Inscriptions constitute an intrinsic and integral part of scientific practice; their…

Reading multimodal (popularized) scientific texts is studied predominantly in terms of said-to-be-required technical decoding skills. In this article I suggest that there are other interesting approaches to studying the reading of multimodal (popularized) scientific texts, approaches that are grounded in social psychological concerns. These…

In spite of calls for increased literacy instruction in secondary content classes, there appears to be little change in practice. One reason for this may be that content area literacy courses inadequately prepared teachers to teach literacy skills specific to their content area. This article describes a program that embeds content area literacy…

The purpose of this study was twofold: to (a) find out what questions currently practicing middle grade teachers have about vocabulary instruction and (b) determine what current undergraduate content area textbooks include that provide answers to these vocabulary questions. As researchers and practitioners directly responsible for teaching…

Provides annotations to eight documents in the ERIC database on the subject of content area reading and vocabulary development. (SG)