The ability to read is the gateway to success in modern knowledge-driven societies. Thus, it is vital to make sure that no child is left behind in his or her endeavor to acquire the cognitive processes needed to understand age-appropriate texts. One significant milestone on the way to reach proficiency in this respect is memorization of certain…

Studies in cognitive science have verified that working memory (where the brain solves problems) can manipulate nearly all elements of knowledge that can be recalled automatically from long-term memory, but only a few elements that have not previously been well memorized. Research in reading comprehension has found that "lecture notes with…

Twenty-four college seniors summarized a 167-word text. Five days later, they completed a sentence-recognition task and described components of successful text summarization. It appeared that students who summarized efficiently also stored information in memory efficiently. (Author/CJ)

In college-level courses, the vast majority of students read expository textbooks with a primary purpose in mind: to memorize and, hopefully, understand enough information to receive a particular grade on a course exam. Intuitively, this kind of reading is different than the kind of reading that these same students do when reading a novel while…