The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading. The students who participated in the study that the authors report on were eighth graders who…

Explores sixth graders' perspectives on the contexts of reading and responding to books in school. Finds children respond to books in patterns specific to school contexts; classroom contexts are socially constructed through children's interactions; and children constructed a community of readers by interacting with one another to respond to books…

Explores the abilities of third graders to interpret literature that serves as an extended metaphor for real life. Finds that using literature to focus children's attention on the similarities that can be drawn across diverse domains provides an avenue for higher-level thinking. (RS)

Examines the author's daughter's spontaneous responses to information books, especially those responses that occurred outside book-sharing sessions. Investigates response episodes as: casual conversations, a reevaluation of facts, reflections of complex thinking, transactions between life and literature, and portraits of personal inquiry. (SR)

Focuses on adolescent students' perceptions of their own actions, thoughts, and motives related to classroom talk about texts. Finds that students are aware of the conditions they believe to be conducive to good discussions, knowledgeable about the different tasks and topics that influence their participation in discussions, and cognizant of how…

Describes the development of the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ), which provides scales that measure seven different aspects of readers' orientation toward literary texts: Insight, Empathy, Imagery Vividness, Leisure Escape, Concern with Author, Story-Driven Reading, and Rejection of Literary Values. Reviews evidence for the LRQ's…

Presents a case study chronicling the written, oral, and fine art responses of four transitional readers and writers (second- and third-grade students) to the picture books of Patricia Polacco and Gerald McDermott. Discusses their responses in three categories: descriptive responses, interpretive responses, and thematic trends. (SR)

Integrates findings from qualitative and quantitative research in conceptual change that investigated text and text-based strategies. Emphasizes findings that have direct implications for instructional research and practice: (1) refutational text is not sufficient to produce conceptual change; (2) discussion of refutational text must be…

Examines processes used when high school students were presented with documents about the Tonkin Gulf Incident. Finds that mental models created by students were more internally consistent after reading at least two documents, but did not become more consistent after that. Notes that students tended to ignore information in the texts when giving…

Reports the impact of metadiscourse on sixth grade students' learning and attitudes. Finds that low-comfort students learn more when informational metadiscourse is presented in interpersonal voice and high-comfort students learn less. Finds that students' attitudes are more tolerant of opinions if they read just one type of metadiscourse. (KEH)

As part of the Folktale project, which explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature from and in different cultures, advanced undergraduate students in classes on literary interpretation or literary history analyzed a Danish, a Greenlandic, and a Turkish folk tale. Two male and two female students in classes on literary…

Confirms that able readers have a more well-rounded sense of story structure than disabled readers. Specifically, that able readers demonstrated an ability to tell more elaborate stories than disabled readers. (FL)

When one educator was teaching English in middle and high school, she wondered why so many adolescents disliked reading. Even teen-aged protagonists and up-to-the-minute topics were not guaranteed to be "interesting." Yet something engages these young readers, at times and in some texts. To begin to get some answers, she interviewed…

A study was conducted to examine motivation as a precursor of reading achievement in middle school students. The California Media and Education Librarians' Literature Reading Survey (1984) was used as the instrument for collection of data. Sixth graders (n=753) of varying ability were studied in six different settings. Data were coded in 10 ethnic…

Describes a study of third- and sixth-grade students indicating no differences in comprehension between story reading on a page and on a computer screen, and that students were more interested in the story while reading from the screen, but that the story was more difficult in this condition. (HTH)