As meaning-making increasingly happens in digital spaces, it is essential for researchers to examine how students learn to critically read and navigate within and across constantly changing online platforms. This qualitative study examines university students' experiences reading and navigating online. To do so, the author examines self-created…

Recently, the term "science of reading" has been used in public debate to promote policies and instructional practices based on research on the basic cognitive mechanisms of reading, the neural processes involved in reading, computational models of learning to read, and the like. According to those views, such data provide convincing…

General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English-speaking middle school students (N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students' knowledge…

The authors discuss the tension between the science of reading and adaptive teaching. The discussion focuses on the ways in which the science of reading emphasizes the teaching of reading as decontextualized and compartmentalized aspects of literacy acquisition that are distant from culturally sustaining and relevant pedagogies and restrict…

To learn to read, the brain must repurpose neural systems for oral language and visual processing to mediate written language. We begin with a description of computational models for how alphabetic written language is processed. Next, we explain the roles of a dorsal sublexical system in the brain that relates print and speech, a ventral lexical…

This study investigated the effects of reading a science text illustrated by either a labeled or unlabeled picture. Both the online process of reading the text and the offline conceptual learning from the text were examined. Eye-tracking methodology was used to trace text and picture processing through indexes of first- and second-pass reading or…

Describes a study which examined the effectiveness of four methods for teaching word meanings. The context method was found to be more effective than the use of category labels and dictionary practice. Associating new words with familiar synonyms was also supported. (MKM)

Compares the effects of two prereading instructional treatments on students' comprehension of narrative and expository texts. Indicates that the teacher-directed condition is more effective than the interactive condition at promoting comprehension, and that both treatment conditions are superior to no prereading instruction at all. (MG)

A study investigated the singular and combined effectiveness of phrasing and repeated readings (practice) on the recall of idea units and narrative categories of fifth grade good and poor readers, concluding that practice rather than phrasing proved to have the most facilitating effect on poor readers' recall of idea units but not narrative…

Describes a study whose purpose was to identify the relative contribution of the nature of instruction and the frequency of encounters in bringing about word knowledge proficiency in fourth-grade children. Results suggest that instruction based on definitional associations is sufficient to affect word knowledge. (HOD)

Indicates that a broad age range of students can use some purpose questions as cues to activate background knowledge. Suggest topic familiarity, amount of information presented, and the presence of genre clues as text features affecting schema activation. (NKA)