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…

Research supports the finding that middle school students prefer hands-on activities to reading and writing to learn new information. However, disciplinary literacy, the reading and writing in science class, is an integral part of inquiry-based science instruction and a necessary complement to hands-on instruction to build student understanding.…

The range of teaching materials now available is becoming increasingly diverse. Despite this, however, the use and influence of textbooks in teaching still remains very high. When instructing reading comprehension, teachers often use textbooks as the basis for teaching in language lessons. Establishing a good match between textbooks and the skills…

This convergent mixed-methods study explored the relation between strategies fourth-grade students self-reported to navigate and interpret science texts and their performance on a comprehension posttest. Using Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), results reveal a higher degree of metacognitive awareness and the ability to orally explain one's…

This convergent mixed-methods study investigated what urban fourth-grade students self-reported for navigating multimodal science books. Reported strategies included general reading processes, clarifying understanding, selecting portions to read, choosing an order to read the text, and interpreting the process in the text. A range of metacognitive…

Integrating reading instruction and content area curriculum has been suggested as a method of improving students' reading comprehension and access to content knowledge. Less clear are the specific practices that should be used across the curriculum to improve comprehension and build knowledge simultaneously. The two studies in this dissertation…

Reading can be considered constitutive epistemology for science and a fundamental aspect of scientific literacy. This study attempted to give further insights into the comprehension of different genres of science texts (textbook and popular science) and the assimilation of the academic language by adolescent age students. The writings 14- and…

Adolescent students require strategies that are tailored to the specific linguistic demands of curricular vocabulary to support their decoding, spelling, and comprehension of novel big words encountered in texts. In this article, the authors describe a morphological instruction approach for helping students navigate big words in science. Reasons…

The ability to comprehend science texts is not only an academic skill but a life skill. Currently, however, the majority of students across grade levels in the United States are reading below grade level "and" have science achievement below grade level. The text structure strategy, a reading comprehension strategy in which students are…

Students in grades 3-6 need to use increasingly sophisticated comprehension skills and strategies as they read and build knowledge across disciplinary content areas. Grounded in research, this book presents effective practices for integrating literacy instruction with literature, science, and social studies. Chapters address text selection,…

Educational reform needs to address the role of literacy in science if there is to be any hope of achieving the goal of literacy for all U.S. students. For reading to play a more prominent role in secondary science, teacher education programs need to develop and offer courses that familiarize preservice science teachers with disciplinary literacy.…

Context-based learning (CBL), promoting students' scientific text comprehension, and fostering metacognitive skills, plays an important role in science education. Our study involves CBL through comprehension and analysis of adapted scientific articles. We developed a module which integrates metacognitive prompts for guiding students to monitor…

The lives of middle school students are dynamic, and their needs and desires are always evolving. They experience more complicated lives as influences of the broader society including popular media and technology, immigration and cultural diversity, amplified political divisiveness, and bullying effect their daily lives both in and out of school.…

Previous research suggests that multiple representations can improve science reading comprehension. This facilitation effect is premised on the observation that readers can efficiently integrate information in text and diagram formats; however, this effect in young readers is still contested. Using eye-tracking technology and sequential analysis,…

The goal of this investigation was to determine which reading instruction improves multiple science text comprehension for college student readers. The authors first identified the cognitive processing strategies that are predictive of multiple science text comprehension (Study 1) and then used what they learned to experimentally test the…