Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

Text is the primary tool to learn disciplinary knowledge in school. Text-based learning is shaped by a complex interplay between the text and reader characteristics. This study examined the role of text structure and inhibition in conceptual learning about energy. Inhibition implies the ability to block dominant but inappropriate responses…

Comprehending expository reading material is a challenge for many students. Research has shown that students' expository reading comprehension can improve with the help of text structure instruction. The purpose of this article is to present teachers with a framework for effectively implementing text structure instruction in their classrooms.…

Students often have difficulty comprehending informational text. Results from a meta-analysis by Hebert, Bohaty, Nelson and Brown (2016) indicated that text structure instruction is effective for improving reading comprehension of expository text. This article presents evidence-based practices for teaching informational text structures to improve…

A question being asked by teachers across the country is, How can I teach students to acquire both the skills and knowledge demanded by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) while simultaneously guiding them to read challenging texts such as those presented in Appendix B of the CCSS? Answering this invites the integration of ideas and the…

Close reading is an instructional practice that has gained attention of late. It involves reading a complex text, annotation, and repeatedly reading to answer text-dependent questions. Although there are a number of recommendations for the use of close reading, there has not been a systematic analysis of student or teacher perceptions of this…

Two measures of syntactic complexity, clauses per T-unit and words per clause, were used to examine differences among four genres of text--narrative, descriptive, compare/contrast, and persuasive--written by the same two cohorts (83 students in grades three and five and 96 students in grades five and seven) on two occasions 2 years apart as part…

Authentic learning experiences are those in which students engage with texts as well as the behaviors of reading and writing within contexts of real-world use beyond traditional academic use. This study provides quantitative analysis of how students (n = 200) engaged with an adult pen pal in a shared literacy experience. Findings indicate that…

Teacher Jennifer Tyler shares her experience of creating a text set for a social studies unit on colonial America.

In many literacy classrooms, teachers provide instruction in comprehension by helping students to practice explicit comprehension strategy use when they encounter difficult texts. In many of those same literacy classrooms, students are placed in peer-led groups to discuss literary texts as a way to increase their engagement with difficult reading.…