Vocabulary knowledge plays a critical role in supporting text comprehension and broader learning across the school day. While school offers opportunities to build vocabulary knowledge, studies have shown that very little time is devoted to vocabulary instruction at the elementary level. This may be, in part, because educators commonly report being…

In some academic topics, like physics, students are required to comprehend tough books and acquire the knowledge contained in them. The majority of content-specific teachers typically feel awkward employing explicit tactics to boost student comprehension, despite the fact that they are adept at teaching the subjects covered in their areas. As a…

Narrative texts have been advocated as tools to tackle science learning challenges, and there is even the proposal of a "narrative effect" on learning. We believe it is necessary to examine previous evidence on this effect, as well as to characterize the process of learning through science narrative texts more broadly. In this article,…

"Science and Children" routinely addresses the challenges teachers face in integrating the "Common Core State Standards" ("CCSS") alongside the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") (e.g., Forsythe, Jackson, and Contreras 2018; Sweetman and Sabella 2018). This article aims to extend this…

Despite advances in inclusion and access to the general curriculum for students with disabilities at large, students with extensive support needs (ESN) continue to receive instruction that is disconnected from the general curriculum and general education peers. One area of the general curriculum that students with ESN have historically lacked…

We conducted two experiments to assess the alignment between Generative AI (GenAI) text personalization and hypothetical readers' profiles. In Experiment 1, four LLMs (i.e., Claude 3.5 Sonnet; Llama; Gemini Pro 1.5; ChatGPT 4) were prompted to tailor 10 science texts (i.e., biology, chemistry, physics) to accommodate four different profiles…

Reading comprehension is an essential skill for learning in general and in science classes. Problems with reading comprehension might hinder students' participation in learning science. Text in science includes specific language features that distinguishes it from narrative text, so should reading instruction be part of teaching science? The…

This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6-8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly…

Conceptual understanding is one of the most difficult issues in teaching physics. This study investigated the effect of adopting cooperative learning and Internet reciprocal teaching (IRT) on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) literacy (physics) in secondary school by comparing the cooperative method with the IRT strategy and…

Reading and understanding scientific literature is an essential skill for any scientist to learn. While students' scientific literacy can be improved by reading research articles, an article's technical language and structure can hinder students' understanding of the scientific material. Furthermore, many students struggle with interpreting graphs…

Elementary teachers are tasked with teaching the language and literacy strategies and skills leading to reading comprehension while also teaching disciplinary content that is the subject of texts, frequently with limited instructional time. Prior research demonstrates that an integrated approach to science and literacy instruction featuring…

Background: Cognitive and linguistic factors have been incorporated into models to explain reading comprehension beyond classical models of reading. This study explores the contribution of executive functions, mainly domain-general and reading-specific cognitive flexibility, in reading comprehension of science texts in monolingual Spanish speaking…

Years of cognitive research has shown background knowledge in key subject areas, like science and social studies, is essential to reading comprehension, helping students not only understand the meaning of a text, but also interpret new words and ideas. Failing to provide the opportunity to learn to read has devastating effects on children and…

School pedagogies that expand opportunities for learners to build and use knowledge for meaningful purposes are resources for hope. Internationally, standards-based reforms in science education position schooling as a context for building and using disciplinary knowledge to explain phenomena and solve problems. There is also growing research…

In this article, I showcase an informational text reading comprehension unit that centers on text features commonly found in science textbooks. I taught this unit to a sixth-grade class and highlighted the work samples of three focal students here. The overarching question that guided this work was as follows: How can I focus my instruction on…