Children's storybooks often contain fantasy elements, from dragons and wizards to anthropomorphic animals that wear clothes, talk, and behave like humans. These elements can impact children's learning from storybooks both positively and negatively, perhaps due in part to their ability to capture children's interest and attention. Prior research…

Inferential comprehension is necessary to connect ideas in a text together in a meaningful manner. There have been multiple studies on inferential comprehension involving texts of different genres (narrative and expository), but not a coherent overview of the findings of inferential comprehension by genre. The purpose of this study is to provide a…

Successful text comprehension requires readers to engage in a number of coherence-building processes. This study examined how analyzing the cohesion of students 'constructed responses can be used to evaluate these coherence-building processes and the extent to which they vary across readers' individual differences and across types of texts. We…

Writing achievement is a complex skill set as characterized by the sociocognitive writing framework, including writing domain knowledge (e.g., sentence structure), general cognitive skills (e.g., critical thinking) and intra- (e.g., interest) and interpersonal (e.g., collaboration) subfactors. During students' postsecondary careers, they need to…

Much of the research that has examined the writing knowledge of school-age students has relied on interviews to ascertain this information, which is problematic because interviews may underestimate breadth and depth of writing knowledge, require lengthy interactions with participants, and do not permit a direct evaluation of a prescribed array of…

Retell is used widely as a measure of reading comprehension. In this meta-analysis, we evaluated the relation between retell and other measures of reading comprehension among students in Grades 1-12. Data from 23 studies (82 effect sizes; N = 4705 participants) showed a moderate relation between retell and other measures of reading comprehension,…

We examined the contributions of English proficiency, genre, and the use of textual sources to adolescent writing. The sample included 1819 native English speakers and language minority students from 127 seventh- and eighth-grade classes in an urban school district. Students were randomly assigned one of three source-based essay prompts…

Understanding students' progress towards meeting grade-level expectations within an academic year is the goal of many education stakeholders so that they can make decisions to adjust instruction and improve students' learning trajectories. The purpose of this study was to explore 4th and 5th grade students' progress towards meeting expectations in…

Thirty-seven deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students in grades four through six participated in a year of Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction, an approach to writing instruction designed to be responsive to DHH students' unique language experiences and profiles. The current study investigated the transfer of writing skills between genres…

Data were collected for this study early in the school year to analyze the direct and indirect effects of word-level literacy skills (word recognition, spelling, and written vocabulary use) and handwriting fluency on writing quality across three genres of typewritten papers. We further explored whether typing fluency and text generation fluency…

We investigated the contributions of multiple strands of factors--individual characteristics (struggling reader status, working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, knowledge-based inference, theory of mind, comprehension monitoring), a text feature (narrative vs. expository genre), and question types (literal and inferential)--to one's…

Based on the analysis of 620 think-aloud verbal protocols from students in grades 7, 9, and 11, we examined students' conscious engagement in inference generation, paraphrasing, verbatim text repetition, and monitoring while reading narrative or informational texts that were either at or above the students' current reading levels. Students were…