This resource is part of a series produced by the Center for Standards and Assessment Implementation (CSAI) to assist teachers and those who support teachers to plan teaching and learning from College and Career Ready Standards (CCRS) for all students, including students with disabilities, English learners, academically at-risk students, students…

The present theoretical paper presents a case for the use of narrative (i.e., fictional written text) in science education as a way of making science meaningful, relevant, and accessible to the public. Grounded in literature pointing to the value of narrative in supporting learning and the need to explore new modes of communicating science, this…

Previous studies have shown that students with low knowledge understand and learn better from more cohesive texts, whereas high-knowledge students have been shown to learn better from texts of lower cohesion. This study examines whether high-knowledge readers in computer science benefit from a text of low cohesion. Undergraduate students (n = 65)…

Teacher Jennifer Tyler shares her experience of creating a text set for a social studies unit on colonial America.

As people attempt to make sense of the world, they develop personal knowledge structures. These structures often contain misconceptions--inaccurate or incomplete information--that are highly resistant to change because existing knowledge networks must be restructured to accommodate counterintuitive information in a process known as conceptual…

The theme for the 62nd annual conference of the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers was Educating for a Just Society. Connie Briggs, previous Program Chair, reminded us that, "Education has always been the foundation of a democratic nation. It is important that our students understand the principles upon which our nation was…

Social networking can currently be described as a mainstream youth activity, with almost half of 8-17-year-old children, who have access to the Internet, claiming to participate. As an activity it is of particular interest to literacy educators because it is enacted through the production and consumption of text. However, a growing body of…

Preliminary efficacy data are reported for a research-based reading intervention designed for struggling readers in high school. PHAST PACES teaches (a) word identification strategies, (b) knowledge of text structures, and (c) reading comprehension strategies. In a quasi-experimental design, 268 intervention and 83 waiting list control students…

This article reviews theoretical and research evidence to support the explicit and systematic teaching of five comprehension strategies that will help all students tackle expository texts with success. The article explains the "High 5!" strategies and how to teach them. An example of a lesson is included to show how the five strategies connect…

This paper examines text structure and patterns of cohesion in stories written by a group of adults with a history of childhood language impairment. The study aimed to extend our knowledge of writing difficulties in this group by building upon a study that examined clause level phenomena (Smith-Lock, Nickels, & Mortensen, this issue). Ten adults…

This study investigated factors that would affect a reader's understanding of the main idea at the global level and explicit and implicit main ideas at the local level. Fifty-seven first-year university students taking a college reading course took a comprehension test on an expository text. Statistical analyses revealed that text structure had a…

The purpose of this research was to examine the effectiveness of teaching fifth grade students with reading difficulties a genre-specific strategy for summarizing and critically analyzing written arguments. In addition, this research explored whether learning this particular reading strategy informed the students' ability to write effective and…

During reading, the model of the situation described by the text is continuously accommodated to new text input. The hypothesis was tested that readers are particularly sensitive to diagnostic text information that can be used to constrain their existing situation model. In 3 experiments, adult participants read narratives about social situations…

Two experiments examined whether text quality is related to online management of the writing processes. Experiment 1 focused on the relationship between online management and text quality in narrative and argumentative texts. Experiment 2 investigated how this relationship might be affected by a goal emphasizing text quality. In both experiments,…

In the study, we investigated effects of 2 different versions of a web-based tutoring system to provide 5th-grade students with strategy instruction about text structure, which was an intervention to improve reading comprehension. The design feature assessed varied in individualization of instruction (individualized or standard). The more…