Purpose: Many PhD students have strong reading comprehension, but some struggle with how to read critically. The purpose of this study is to understand what reading looks like for PhD students, what they are doing when they read scholarly texts and how they bring these texts to life in meaningful ways. Design/methodology/approach: The authors…

This quantitative study endeavored to compare a new strategy of making irrelevant information less salient with a common reading strategy of highlighting to determine which would best aid students in making connections within and between multiple texts. Participants were 60 high school students, ranging in age from 14-17 years old. The adolescents…

Reading is an activity in which both researchers and students invest immense time and energy. However, reading is disregarded as a research method and generally assigned a marginal position as a mere supplement to empirical hands-on methods. In this article we argue that reading should be recognized as a method of inquiry. Based on qualitative…

Background/purpose: This study aims to examine the implementation of structured reading strategies through the Reader Response Approach (RRA) in an online EFL reading class to enhance students' reading comprehension and critical engagement with literary texts. Responding to a text allows readers to deepen their understanding, articulate personal…

We examined sixth graders' detection of inconsistencies in narrative and expository passages, contrasting participants who were monolingual speakers (N = 85) or Spanish-English DLLs (N = 94) when recruited in pre-kindergarten (PK). We recorded self-paced reading times and judgments about whether the text made sense, and took an independent measure…

Since 2013, the Notice and Note signposts have become an increasingly popular method of teaching close reading strategies, yet little research has been conducted to evaluate whether the signposts are more or less effective in improving reading comprehension and critical thinking skills than other close reading methods. The study attempted to…

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 study investigated whether memory for conflicting information predicted mental representation of source-content links (i.e., who said what) in a sample of 86 Norwegian adolescent readers. Participants read four texts presenting conflicting claims about sun exposure and health. With differences in gender, prior knowledge, and interest…

Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers' comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers' beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers'…

In the author's experience, a significant source of reading difficulty for many beginning and struggling readers are misconceptions about print concepts so basic teachers assume their students are aware of them. Many children fail to grasp implicit principles of print such as the following: the reader cannot make up the words, the order of letters…

A common technique to aid in developing critical thinking skills is to suggest pertinent and key questions and recommend that readers engage in an internal dialogue to answer these questions. This approach can be used effectively in reading newspaper articles and will become more useful with practice. Twelve constructive questions that newspaper…

This activity notebook is intended to help French-speaking students in Alberta, Canada, develop reflective reading practices. Following an introduction and information (with graphics) on the notebook's organization, the notebook is divided into three sections of reading strategies: the first section contains three activities, the second section…

One reason that university students fail to achieve optimally in course work is their lack of reading skills. The higher education student needs to achieve skills appropriate to the involved task in reading. Through diagnosis, it is possible to ascertain weak links in the reading achievement of students. For students to achieve optimally from…

In this article, the authors examined readers' sensitivity to the match between characters' goals and characters' actions. In Experiment 1, readers integrated actions consistent with characters' goals more easily when there was a match between the extremeness of the actions and the urgency of the goals. In Experiments 2 and 3, characters'…

Asserts that teachers should help students move beyond an information-exchange view of reading to a more complex rhetorical model of constructing meaning. Reports on a study which investigated meaning constructions and compares the more traditional function/feature strategies of constructing meaning with rhetorical strategies, which construct…