Contends that literature is a means by which people are constructed as social beings. Proposes accomplishing this by teaching students to read critically and interrogatively. Concludes that English teachers need to nurture skills, attitudes, and habits of critical reading in students. (PM)

Describes a year-long study in a combined fourth- and fifth-grade classroom that observed student participation in literacy learning activities. Notes that as students participated in reading, writing, and talking about quality literature, they learned to make sense of texts by using contextual clues and connecting the reading to their own…

Proposes that both formal and informal tests of literature comprehension at the secondary level should be congruent with the latest research on the dynamic complexity of reading comprehension. Provides a conceptual framework and literary examples on how to design "transformative" tests (learning activities used for the purposes of…

Describes a coding system to motivate and assess students' journal entries as they respond to books they are reading. Argues that coded journal entries are an effective means for diagnosing reading comprehension difficulties. Contends that coding journal entries permits the students to become more conscious of their reading processes. (RS)

Describes how shared learning activities, including cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and small group learning, can develop critical reading and problem-solving skills. Discusses the teacher's role in guiding shared learning activities. (MM)

Describes a course on critical reading at Indiana University-Bloomington that uses case studies of problematic teaching situations and computer-assisted communications to help students develop dialectical thinking processes. The use of two computer programs, Electronic Classroom and RoundTable, is explained; argument analysis is discussed; and…

Describes a teaching exercise in an undergraduate psychology course in which students read a book with unconventional perspectives on the field of study. Maintains that the activity develops critical reading and thinking skills by confronting students with controversial views. Identifies some of the books selected to fit the criteria of this…

Discusses the evaluation of children's literature and children's responses to literature, examining ideas posed by various writers and scholars, offering an example of a critical reading of one text, and noting several themes that are apparent in the text (e.g., gaining access to cultural institutions, refuting stereotypic images, and creating…

Describes one approach (group presentations) that has been particularly successful in developing both the skills and the disposition toward critical reading. Describes creating the classroom environment, as well as three presentations (one small-group and two large-group) in which students participate over the course of the semester that are…

A series of programs entitled Creationism and Evolution: The History of a Controversy was presented at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The controversy was addressed from an historical and sociological, rather than a scientific perspective. Speakers addressed the evolution of scientific creationism, ancient texts versus sedimentary rocks…

Describes the success of a unit for tenth-grade students wherein they created a book of poetry. Provides guidelines for the unit and evaluation criteria. Claims the "books" turned out to be far superior to the "flat pro forma" poetry papers assigned in the past. (NH)

Two classes in Developmental Reading were trained in question-formulation and were then required to ask any number and type of questions based on four texts. Three inter-raters coded the questions for their content and form. The results of the study showed the dominance of recognition or retrieval questions, suggesting the students' proficiency in…

Revealing or visualizing the thinking involved in making clinical decisions is a challenge. A case study is presented with a visual implement for sharing the diagnostic process. This technique adapts the Bayesian approach to the case presentation. Pretest probabilities and likelihood ratios are gathered to obtain post-test probabilities of every…

This article describes how four Samoan teachers used critical literacy in their classrooms after they first encountered the idea in a children's literature course that the author taught over a five-week period in Samoa in 2005. The author explores the impact of multicultural pedagogical methods on teacher professional development and in-service…

This teacher-research study examines the roles of talk and metaphorical representation in the construction of personal and social literary interpretation. Over three years, the investigator collected data from fourth-grade children's sketched interpretations about literature, their written commentaries, and conversations that occurred before,…