Presented here is a practical tool called the Active Reading Document (ARD) that can give students the necessary incentive to engage with the text/readings. By designing the tool to incrementally develop student understanding of the material through reading using Marzano's Taxonomy as a framework, the ARD offers support through scaffolding as they…

This paper highlights reciprocal teaching as an inclusive instructional strategy that has been shown to improve reading comprehension and metacognitive skills. It provides a conceptual background to reciprocal teaching and examines its purpose, strengths and weaknesses. The notion of reciprocal teaching as an evidence-based practice is also…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize the value of teaching students to engage with complex text. But what exactly makes a text complex, and how can teachers help students develop their ability to learn from such texts? The authors of this article discuss five factors that determine text complexity: vocabulary, sentence structure, coherence,…

Adults with learning disabilities (LD) attending adult basic education, GED programs, or community colleges are among the lowest performers on measures of literacy. For example, on multiple measures of reading comprehension, adults with LD had a mean reading score at the third grade level, whereas adults without LD read at the fifth grade level.…

The reading attainment of the 3,875 primary 4 Hong Kong primary school students participating in the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study ranked first among 49 countries and regions surveyed worldwide. Analysis of the association between (a) participating students' reading attainment and (b) responses to questionnaires completed…

An educational research project dealt with teaching slow learners to analyze their values related to public and private issues. Findings from a test sample of 75 ninth and tenth grade slow learning students indicated that the students did not exhibit greater understanding of value dilemmas when classroom projects dealing with the dilemmas were…

Literacy is often broadly defined as the ability to read, write, speak, listen, and think critically. Young people need to develop strong literacy skills to communicate effectively, gain respect from peers and authority, participate in their communities in a meaningful way, and fully contribute to society. Building literacy, therefore, goes far…

Grounded in schema and generative theories, this research suggests a theoretical framework and a task-specific procedure for integrating reading and writing. Fourth grade students were given a text-related generative writing task and reading recall test. Results support the notion of using writing as an orienting task prior to reading. (DST)

An investigation was conducted to ascertain the effects of the structured overview on both the short-term and long-term comprehension of average and below average readers. The subjects were 143 college students classified as average or below average readers and randomly assigned to either a structured overview (65) or a control group (78). Both…

This study investigated the effectiveness of teaching specific rather than global comprehension skills; the correlations among sex, intelligence level, and comprehension gain when taught global or specific comprehension skills; and the correlations between the factors of intelligence, comprehension, and vocabulary without regard for the teaching…

Self talk (thoughts about one's self and own performance while learning or working) can affect cognitive and learning strategies that in turn affect specific learning techniques. Negative self talk can interfere with learning since it reinforces feelings of failure, thereby increasing the probability of continued failure, and maintains an…

This study investigated the association between college students' engagement of learning strategies and their academic performance in a freshman psychology course. Three groups of students participated in the study: 22 at-risk freshmen who were taught learning strategies in a linked strategy-instruction course; 22 students who had previously taken…

This article reviews literature supporting the relationship of emotional factors and success in reading and writing activities, outlines physical and language behaviors that indicate emotional involvement with success or lack of success in comprehension, and presents strategies that help children understand what they need to do to read and write…