While existing studies have underscored the educational benefits of generating explanatory hypotheses (EHs) in response to unexpected outcomes, empirical research on the underlying mechanisms driving their effectiveness in science learning remains limited. Thus, this study aimed to empirically examine the effectiveness of generating an EH for…

This mixed-methods study analyzed how elementary-school children translated while reading Spanish-English dual-language books (DLBs). Specifically, it investigated the types of strategies students used to translate words in DLBs, strategies' success, and differences in strategy use based on grade, home language(s), and oral reading accuracy.…

Gifted students who were in a fifth-grade telescoped math class during the 2013-2014 school year participated in an in-person qualitative research study regarding their identity development. During the 2019-2020 school year, these same students, who were now juniors and seniors in high school, were contacted to participate in a follow-up study.…

Prior knowledge activation is a crucial component of reading comprehension. Previous studies have examined students' prompted (or solicited) purposeful knowledge activation, which occurs when the explicit goal is to activate knowledge, as well as ancillary knowledge activation, which is when students indirectly use their prior knowledge to fill in…

As suggested by its title, this article reports on a Think Aloud in Group (TAG) practice in which a group of Y5 children thought aloud the poem "The Blue Boy", written in Portuguese by Cecília Meireles and translated into English by Sarah Rebecca Kersley. As a dialogical and collaborative literacy practice, TAG aims to transform the…

This article is on pedagogical translanguaging, understood as planned instructional strategies used with a pedagogical purpose in a multilingual educational context. The paper reports a study on cognate identification and cognate awareness carried out in a multilingual primary school. The study aims at analyzing whether the identification of…

Given the multilingual population of the United States, dual-language books (DLBs), or books with the complete text written in two languages, are often recommended for teachers to use in their classrooms to validate students' language and culture, facilitate language learning, and support (bi)literacy development. These recommendations are based…

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics highlight the importance of not only content standards for mathematics but also mathematical practices such as communication, representation, and reasoning, skills that are often difficult for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Through a single-case multiple-probe-across-participants…

This paper marks the second in a series of five reports detailing the work of the Optimizing Assessment for All (OAA) project at Brookings to strengthen education systems capacity to integrate 21st century skills into teaching and learning, using assessment as a lever for changing classroom practices. Twenty-first century skills (21CS) are now…

The purpose of this study was to examine moment-by-moment fluctuations in text comprehension processing and determine how and when poor and good comprehenders differ. To do so, we reanalyzed a dataset of think-aloud protocols from 138 intermediate elementary students. Both good and poor comprehenders used a variety of processing strategies when…

Words can be informative linguistic markers of psychological constructs. The purpose of this study is to examine associations between word use and the process of making meaningful connections to a text while reading (i.e., inference generation). To achieve this purpose, think-aloud data from third-fifth grade students (N = 218) reading narrative…

The aim of the study was to investigate differences in cognitive and metacognitive strategy use in the reading comprehension of narrative and expository texts among students with learning disabilities (SLD) and without learning disabilities (SWOLD). A total of 122 fifth and sixth graders took part in the study. Half of them (n = 61) were SLD…

The goal was to test whether cognitive flexibility moderates the relation between reading strategy use and reading comprehension during the elementary years. Seventy-five second- through fifth-grade students completed a think aloud task and a metacognitive questionnaire to measure reading strategies, two card-sorting tasks to measure general and…

Tired of hearing about "complex text"? Bothered by the pushy messages about "challenge"? This book is for you! Unlike the many other materials on text complexity, this one focuses on specific comprehension skills that students need in order to really engage with text. This book will help elementary school teachers equip their…

The act of creating meaning with texts is complex, and this complexity creates unclear views of instruction in schools and even greater perplexity in knowing how to instruct students who may be struggling in this area of their schoolwork. Comprehension is often measured in schools as a product and an outcome, making it difficult to understand why…