When students arrive at university there is an expectation that they come already equipped with the skills they need to read academic texts. In contrast, many students have low confidence in their ability to read challenging texts, often experiencing this as a barrier to engaging with academic practices. Recent research has identified the…

Students engage in higher-order thinking as they read complex texts and perform complex reading-related tasks. However, the most consequential assessments, high-stakes tests, are currently limited in providing information about students' higher-order thinking. In this article, we describe higher-order thinking in relation to reading. We provide a…

This article addresses 3 broad challenges of assessment in reading comprehension: (a) explicitly articulating the knowledge and skills students need to recognize and be able to use in comprehending complex texts; (b) understanding how knowledge and skills progress and successively deepen and develop over repeated opportunities to engage in tasks…

The benefits of engaging with age-appropriate reading materials in classroom settings are numerous. For example, students' comprehension is developed as they acquire new vocabulary and concepts. The Common Core requires all students have daily opportunities to engage with "complex text" regardless of students' decoding levels. However,…

The use of informational texts in the elementary grades provides a context for helping students develop content understanding and domain knowledge across a wide range of subject matter. Reading informational text also provides students with the language of thought, foundational vocabulary that can be connected to other words, and technical content…

What is meant by text complexity is a measurement of how challenging a particular text is to read. There are a myriad of different ways of explaining what makes text challenging to read, from the sophistication of the vocabulary employed to the length of its sentences to even measurements of how the text as a whole coheres. Research shows that no…

"The Critical Word Factor," based on word recognition demands of texts, is a measure of text difficulty designed specifically for texts used by beginning readers. The measure is a function of the number of new, unique words per 100 running words of text that fall outside a designated curriculum. The authors investigated the validity of the…

A study investigated how students' mental representation of an expository text and the inferences they used in summarizing varied as a function of text difficulty and of differences in the task. Subjects, 96 college students and students from grades 6 and 10, wrote summaries of expository texts and answered orally several probe questions about the…