Discusses how two questionnaires helped a middle school teacher find out what strategies her students used to choose books and whether they were making successful choices. Presents teaching suggestions based on the results of the questionnaires. (SR)

The purpose of this paper is to make educators, authors, and publishers aware that they must be concerned with rhetorical form as well as content if they wish to present students with accessible, useful textbooks. Using a case study of textbook perception and use in a school district's sixth grade social studies classrooms, the paper illustrates…

Presents the results of two studies where children were taught to identify textual cues, syntactic and semantic, in order to locate main ideas. The children also built graphic representations of these structures and were taught relevant questions to ask regarding comprehension. Results showed significant improvement, especially with older…

Describes a long-term project where middle school students were taught to visually represent key text ideas through idea-mapping techniques. Instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum along with regular textbooks and supplementary material. Positive effects were found in recall, comprehension, and learning. (MJP)