Reading comprehension is multidimensional and complex. The persistent challenges children, adolescents, and even adults face with reading comprehension call for concerted efforts to develop assessments that help identify sources of difficulties and to design instructional approaches to prevent or ameliorate these difficulties. Doing so requires…

In the late 1970's, Durkin's landmark study showed that less than 1% of elementary classroom reading instruction was dedicated to comprehension strategies because teachers were not explicit in their instruction. This qualitative study explored the types of questions posed by elementary and middle school teachers to elicit students' responses and…

This compilation explains the Strategic Reading Project (SRP), a long-term staff development project for schools committed to improving their students' ability to read strategically. Noting that the SRP has been designed for elementary schools, the compilation points out that the project is adaptable to high schools. The Project Team Notebook in…

One way of helping learners to develop knowledge, skills, and predispositions essential for independent learning is by teaching reading in content areas to help learners acquire the necessary strategies to use reading and writing to gain new knowledge. Conent area texts pose differing demands because each body of knowledge has its own framework…

This paper addresses the role of prior knowledge in the comprehension of narrative and expository text, two major categories of discourse. The paper reviews some of the differences in the essence of prior knowledge required to comprehend each text type and then examines research on prior knowledge and conceptual change that deals with both text…

Examines reader and text variables related to conceptual change learning from science textbooks. Shows it is difficult to change readers' prior knowledge by reading texts that are inconsistent with that knowledge, but refutation text was shown to impact students' prior knowledge when that knowledge contained naive scientific conceptions. Addresses…

Two experiments investigated the role of text coherence in junior high school students' comprehension of science texts. Found that text coherence improved readers' comprehension, but also that giving readers with sufficient background knowledge an incoherent text that forced them to infer unstated relations engaged them in compensatory processing,…