Gateway science courses are an ongoing obstacle to recruitment into STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Students come into courses that have a high cognitive load, which makes success in the course challenging. Instructional design can be used to reduce cognitive load. The findings demonstrate that leveraging pre- and…

We developed a comprehensive training module for the undergraduates majoring in chemical education with a simple microfluidic experiment. The students were required to read a scientific reference offered by the instructor, then design and implement a microfluidic experiment for real sample analysis by making some modifications to the method…

Vocabulary is a building block of understanding, especially in science classrooms where language abilities are mixed. To reduce academic inequalities, approaches to vocabulary instruction need to demonstrate benefits for students across learning contexts. We summarize the results from the first unit, "Earth Systems and Catastrophic…

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…

Background: To succeed in school, young children must acquire the domain and vocabulary knowledge needed to read complex texts. Despite the growing literacy demands in the 21 century, fewer than 5% of US school children in the early elementary grades can evaluate complex nonfiction texts and there are larger gaps based on family income and student…

Students who struggle with vocabulary knowledge often see a decline in comprehension of content. Even students who receive strong reading instruction in the early elementary years may still experience the fourth-grade slump (Chall, 1983), which more often affects students from underserved populations. Many of those same students are also affected…

In this year-long randomized control trial (RCT), we evaluated the effectiveness of a year-long, intensive, and structured virtual professional development (VPD) accompanying science-integrated English-as-second-language (ESL) instructional intervention on 187 second grade English learners' English language and literacy development in suburban…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of comprehension training embedded in a program that taught science content to 2nd graders. The program included instruction about the structure of compare-contrast expository text, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and the close analysis of well-structured text exemplars. This…

This paper describes a comprehensive set of studies designed to assess the potential for commercial reading programs to teach reading in science. Specific questions focus on the proportion of selections in the programs that contain science and the amount of science that is in those selections, on the genres in which the science is portrayed, on…