Despite proficient math skills, students may struggle to make sense of and solve story problems. While educators are encouraged to promote the use of comprehension strategies, students must first understand vocabulary at all levels as they work to make sense of and solve math story problems. Language skills are a prerequisite for schema…

The act of writing involves decision-making that can be challenging for elementary students as they choose ideas, organization structures, and audiences for whom to share their messages. Teachers can support students in their decision-making through providing explicit explanation of the metacognitive decision-making that occurs at each stage of…

Comprehension strategy instruction has been widely studied in the past 10 years. We now know that students who actively engage and interact with text using particular cognitive strategies are more likely to understand and remember more of what they have read. Students who use these strategies are able to access knowledge that is outside the realm…

Discusses how to help children understand the reading process instead of simply recalling information. Presents two instructional strategies which help children learn metacomprehension. (MM)

Discusses the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension. Cites recent research supporting the utility of both direct and indirect vocabulary instruction. (MM)

Presents a language arts unit designed to create bridges between the real world and the story in order to help children develop both social understanding and reading comprehension skills. (FL)

Suggests that teaching schema that gives learners not details but a process for interpreting stories will produce results with carryover. (FL)

Offers suggestions to help teachers facilitate comprehension before, during, and after reading. (FL)

Suggests that reversing a basal reading lesson sequence can help teachers achieve some of the tenets of schema theory. Presents a lesson that does this. (FL)

Describes the instructional procedures used in a method to enhance children's concept of story. (FL)

Argues that vocabulary is best taught by helping students experience the meaning of words. Offers research background and four teaching methods to use with intermediate grade students. (FL)

Describes how semantic webbing exercises are useful for activating background knowledge, increasing organizational skills, focusing on the topic, and notetaking. (MM)

Notes research showing that narration and opinion writing are two different crafts and that children differentiate between the two when they write. (FL)

Argues that while story grammar is useful in teaching students to analyze stories, teachers must be aware that a story grammar approach appropriate for stories written in the Western tradition may not match stories written in the traditions of other cultures. Uses Japanese folktales to illustrate the point. (FL)

Describes how an excerpt from an electronics magazine challenged the author to examine problems in reading comprehension. Notes the sources of difficulty in understanding demanding text, and states that prior knowledge--not isolated comprehension skills--is necessary to create meaning from a text. (MM)