Reading comprehension is multidimensional and complex. The persistent challenges children, adolescents, and even adults face with reading comprehension call for concerted efforts to develop assessments that help identify sources of difficulties and to design instructional approaches to prevent or ameliorate these difficulties. Doing so requires…

Focuses on a general document navigation strategy called the known/need-to-know strategy. Illustrates the strategy using a variant of this strategy called "locate." (SR)

Inaugurates this column's topic for the year: document strategy procedures and ways to teach them. Argues that knowledge of document structures allows for better knowledge of the cognitive steps and metacognitive strategies in document processing. (SR)

Reviews document strategies called "locate tasks." Discusses "cycle tasks," tasks requiring two or more locate tasks, repeating the known/need-to-know steps, thus cycling to earlier steps in the known/need-to-know procedure. (SR)

Discusses using the procedures of identification, problem formulation, and computation to solve two different types of math document problems: those involving locate procedures and those involving cycling procedures. (SR)

Describes three "generate" strategies for seeking information in text when expected clues are missing. (SR)

Integrating metacognitive skills into classroom instruction can help students to develop into active, independent readers and learners. B. Armbruster, in a summary of research on metacognition, examined reading to learn from a metacognitive perspective as it related to four variables: texts, tasks, strategies, and learner characteristics.…

Suggests modeling of thought processes with expository text structure as one method of promoting strategic reading with students. Explains that modeling involves explaining the kinds of strategies used and the reasoning involved in the process of making sense of text. (MG)

Discusses how to create a profile of students' abilities to apply document strategies (locate, cycle, and integrate strategies). (SR)

Investigates how readers use textual cohesion during reading by using a selective deletion procedure. Finds that good readers are able to maintain the global unity of text better than poor readers and that both groups find it easier to perceive cohesion in fiction than in non-fiction. (RS)

Identifying the main points of a communication is fundamental to successful reading comprehension. Discussed are difficulties in defining main idea, text structure variables in determining important information, textual hierarchy and the theory of macrostructure, text features signalling important information, summary writing, learning-disabled…

Using a recursive network transition model for depicting stories to generate two stories of contrasting structure (successive episodes organized by topic and embedded episodes organized by failed and successful goals), a study examined the understanding of the structures by having children in the third through eleventh grades rate each story…

Examines advantages and disadvantages of using textbooks as the basis for curriculum and instruction, discussing textbooks as the predominant instructional medium. The article describes attributes of good textbooks and text structures, identifies strategies for improving readers' text comprehension, and notes teachers' role as facilitators in…

Reading is construed as operating within the dynamics of the relationship of reader, text, context, and language system. Context is understood as the cultural and situational environment of the text, itself a semantic unit that is an instance of the language system. A related variable for reading is the awareness of the reader of the language…

Two experiments investigated the role of text coherence in junior high school students' comprehension of science texts. Found that text coherence improved readers' comprehension, but also that giving readers with sufficient background knowledge an incoherent text that forced them to infer unstated relations engaged them in compensatory processing,…