This Teaching and Learning Guide highlights how early childhood teachers can support emotional intelligence and inferential comprehension by drawing children's attention to characters' feelings and by asking students to notice evidence from the illustrations and text. During this read-aloud in Ms. Clark's first grade classroom, we see evidence of…

Generating accurate inferences is crucial for the successful comprehension of text and is a skill that needs to be supported starting in the early grades. Teachers can support inference-making during read-aloud lessons by asking inferential questions and providing scaffolding and feedback on students' inference-making. In this article, we describe…

Generating accurate inferences is crucial for the successful comprehension of text and is a skill that needs to be supported starting in the early grades. Teachers can support inference-making during read-aloud lessons by asking inferential questions and providing scaffolding and feedback on students' inference-making. In this article, we describe…

We examined the efficacy of a Technology-Based Early Language Comprehension Intervention (TeLCI) designed to teach inferencing in a non-reading context. A group of Grades 1 and 2 students from 2 elementary schools in the U.S. Midwest identified as at risk of comprehension difficulties were assigned randomly to a business-as-usual control group or…

Research on text comprehension in relation to the reading medium (paper or screen) has mainly involved undergraduate or high school students. To advance current knowledge on the effects of reading medium, this longitudinal study focused on beginner readers, specifically, the role of precursors in first graders' comprehension of narrative and…

This study compared the sentence hyperbole comprehension performance of Chinese poor readers with various levels of arithmetic proficiency. A total of 168 Chinese poor readers in Grade 1 were recruited, and their nonverbal intelligence, verbal working memory, Chinese receptive vocabulary, Chinese grammatical knowledge, character reading and…

In the current study, we investigated the role of executive functions in explaining how word recognition and language comprehension jointly predict reading comprehension in multilingual and monolingual students (Grades 1 and 2). Specifically, mediation and moderation models were tested and compared to offer a more nuanced understanding of the role…

We examined the relations of inference, vocabulary, decoding, short-term memory, and attentional control to reading comprehension and mathematics performance for first-grade students in the US (N = 83). The students were composed of 75% Hispanics, 15% Whites, and 6% Asian Americans. Students' performance on mathematics and reading comprehension…

In this article, the authors report findings from a yearlong study that addressed teaching first-grade students to make inferences and engage in inferential discussion about children's literature. Because of the importance of both inferencing and discussion for comprehension, a collaborative team of two researchers and a classroom teacher focused…

The authors propose an integrative theoretical model of reading called the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER) that builds on and extends several prominent theoretical models of reading. According to DIER, the following skills and knowledge are involved in reading comprehension: word reading, listening comprehension, text reading…

The authors propose an integrative theoretical model of reading called the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER) that builds on and extends several prominent theoretical models of reading. According to DIER, the following skills and knowledge are involved in reading comprehension: word reading, listening comprehension, text reading…

We examined the Direct and Indirect Effects model of Writing (DIEW), using longitudinal data from Korean-speaking beginning writers. DIEW posits hierarchical structural relations among component skills (e.g., transcription skills, higher order cognitive skills, oral language, motivation/affect, background knowledge) where lower level skills are…

We examined the Direct and Indirect Effects model of Writing (DIEW), using longitudinal data from Korean-speaking beginning writers. DIEW posits hierarchical structural relations among component skills (e.g., transcription skills, higher order cognitive skills, oral language, motivation/affect, background knowledge) where lower level skills are…

We investigated the dimensionality and relations between L1 (a speaker's first language) and L2 (a speaker's second language) writing skills in narrative and informational genres and higher order cognitive skills--inference, perspective taking, and comprehension monitoring--for Spanish-English dual language learners in primary grades. Dimensions…

Two experiments investigated 1st-, 3rd-, and 5th-grade children's and adults' judgments related to the controllability of cognitive activities, including object recognition, inferential reasoning, counting, and pretending. In Experiment 1, fifth-grade children and adults rated transitive inference and interpretation of ambiguous pictures as more…