The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of students' background knowledge and how they utilized "don't know" affordances to comprehend and learn from text. In two studies, over 8,000 middle and high school students interacted with a content-area learning environment in which they answered a series of background…

Ongoing research-practice conversations between teachers and researchers have identified a practical tension faced by teachers of upper primary/early secondary students whose progress has slowed. Teachers report that a researcher-led push to develop more sophisticated readings of complex texts results in less reading mileage, potentially impacting…

While composition research recognizes the importance of the body and bodily knowledge, literacy instruction, especially as relayed in writing textbooks, often disembodies the material practice of reading. This move, in turn, contributes to normative assumptions about students' corporeal reading experiences. Drawing together scholarship on…

Teachers of elementary English language arts/literacy (ELA) tend to line up behind one of two very different approaches to reading instruction. The first approach prioritizes reading comprehension strategies over content. The second rests on the idea that building background knowledge of the world, including the vocabulary that accompanies such…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of decoding and reading fluency to reading comprehension and how it differs across different types of comprehension measures among 4th-grade students with reading difficulties and disabilities (M age = 9.8, SD = 0.6). Results indicated that decoding and reading fluency predicted 8.1% to…

International education policy makers, donors, and implementers have heavily emphasized correct words per minute (CWPM) to measure reading intervention impact. While fluency integrates accuracy, automaticity, and prosody, the dominant measurement approach measures rate and accuracy within 1 minute, thereby privileging the need for speed. Many…

Due to the increasing educational use of the Internet, children in elementary school need to critically evaluate source information to judge the trustworthiness of information. Studies with adult readers show that sourcing prompts and mutually exclusive claims in reading materials promote the use of source information. However, little is known…

Aim: This position paper illustrates prominent theories of reading comprehension and considers how these models have informed reading instruction within the classroom. It then considers how reading comprehension can be supported by educational psychologists (EPs). Methods: This paper presents five sociocultural models of reading comprehension.…

With increased availability of information in modern societies, individuals are often faced with complex decisions regarding how to integrate and judge the veracity of available information. Generally, these issues have been approached using computational techniques to "detect" and "reduce" the spread of information across…

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of students' background knowledge and how they utilized "don't know" affordances to comprehend and learn from text. In two studies, over 8,000 middle and high school students interacted with a content-area learning environment in which they answered a series of background…

Statistical data analysis was used to test social cognitive theory's mediation model in the domain of reading. The mediation model asserts that reading self-efficacy fully mediates the relationship between reading anxiety and reading comprehension performance. This study tested the mediation model using measures of reading self-efficacy, reading…

Technology-mediated learning is very actively and widely researched, with numerous e-learning environments designed for different educational purposes developed during the past few decades. Still, their organization and texts are not structured according to any theory of educational comprehension. Modern education is even more flexible and, thus,…

Theory of mind is the understanding that other people have mental states that drive their actions and that those mental states can be different from one's own. Without understanding theory of mind and being able to take others' perspectives, it could be difficult for children to read and understand narrative texts. This paper posits that…

The present research explored the awareness that readers have of the difficulty of negative text and aimed to determine whether rereading could impact comprehension and metacomprehension. Participants read passages that sometimes contained negative words such as 'no' and 'not', rated their comprehension, and answered a comprehension question about…

Communication in the 21st century is no longer limited to a mastery of literal level comprehension, although it is an essential element of understanding. Now, more than ever, it is paramount that students are able to read and critically analyze texts in various genres. Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear and Leu (2008) outline the notion of New Literacies as…