Although links between knowledge and reading comprehension have been widely documented for decades, recent translational science publications (e.g., teacher journals, books, and podcasts) have increasingly referred to studies using baseball (a sport popular in the USA) as a proxy for knowledge to explain those links, especially within science of…

It has been repeatedly found that idioms are processed faster than syntactically matched literal phrases, in both comprehension and production. This has led to debate about whether idioms are accessed as chunks or built compositionally, with different studies attempting to measure the effect of compositionality on processing, with differing…

Many literacy experts believe close reading has the power to create strong, independent readers, but what does that really mean, and how does it work in the classroom? This book is your must-have guide to getting started! It provides step-by-step strategies and scaffolds for teaching close reading and improving students' comprehension of complex…

Purpose: The purposes of this clinical focus article are to describe differences in expressive prosody among autistic individuals, describe the role of prosody in reading comprehension, highlight the potential contribution of prosody to the reading comprehension difficulties experienced by many autistic individuals, discuss interventions that…

This study used fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of supernatural fiction, featuring either fictional or realistic characters, compared to real-world stories. Participants' brain activations were recorded while they read supernatural/realistic scenarios. Results showed that…

Common depictions of the simple view of reading (SVR), in both research and practice, describe reading comprehension difficulties by using the dichotomous variables of "poor" and "good" for each of its three constructs. But these fail to accurately capture the role the product of the two subcomponents of word recognition and…

The science of reading movement has done much to improve instruction in foundational skills. But that hard-won progress may be reversed unless we also help children acquire the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand complex text. At the same time, the science of learning movement has introduced many educators to evidence-based teaching…

Reading comprehension has been mostly studied using traditional texts and very little is known about reading comprehension in comics. We wanted to find out whether comics could enhance comprehension processes, compared to traditional text and what cognitive processes might be involved in this effect. Furthermore, we explored the functional role of…

Many teachers tirelessly grapple with topics of text selection, evaluation, and comprehension--examining elements of diversity, quality, and kid appeal to empower teachers to select titles for classrooms through a critical lens--under a mandated scripted curriculum. The purpose of this column is to explore and draw upon teachers' knowledge around…

Although the generalized deterministic inputs, noisy "and" gate model (G-DINA; de la Torre, 2011) is a general cognitive diagnosis model (CDM), it does not account for the heterogeneity that is rooted from the existing latent groups in the population of examinees. To address this, this study proposes the mixture G-DINA model, a CDM that…

This study aims to expand our understanding of the relations of oral reading fluency at word, sentence, and passage levels to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking secondary school-aged students. In total, 80 participants (46 males and 34 females) ranging from 13 to 15 years old joined this study and were tested on tasks of oral reading…

Accurately judging students' comprehension is a key professional competence for teachers. It is crucial for adapting instruction to students' needs and thereby promoting student learning. According to the cue-utilization framework, the accuracy of teachers' judgments depends on how predictive (or diagnostic) the information (or cues) that teachers…

Louise Rosenblatt's well-known concept of stance distinguishes between efferent reading (reading to take something away from the text) and aesthetic reading (reading for the experience of dwelling in the text). This article proposes a refinement to this binary, adding the concept of afferent reading. Afference, in biology, means a bringing-to, and…

The use of texts is an indispensable resource for students' learning, especially in science domains. While developing understanding of a specific topic usually is the main goal of reading expository texts, an important consideration is how to best measure whether this understanding has been reached. In this study, we aimed to analyze gains in…

Writing an integrated essay based on multiple-documents requires students to both comprehend the documents and integrate the documents into a coherent essay. In the current study, we examined the effects of summarization as a potential reading strategy to enhance participants' multiple-document comprehension and integrated essay writing.…