Given the centrality of data visualizations in communicating scientific information, increased emphasis has been placed on the development of students' graph literacy--the ability to generate and interpret data representations--to foster understanding of domain-specific knowledge and the successful navigation of everyday life. Despite prior…

In science education, building models of dynamical systems is a promising method for understanding various natural phenomena and artifacts with scientific concepts. It is, however, difficult to learn skills and concepts necessary for modeling. Though several model-building learning environments (MBEs) have been developed with potentially useful…

Irony comprehension can be a kind of challenge to those who are relatively less skillful in reading. To examine how DHH college students (DCSs) were different from hearing college students (HCSs) in the reading of ironic discourses, we conducted two experiments in the self-paced reading task. In Experiment 1, the statement was either literally…

Children's picture books, both fiction and non-fiction, play a vital role in introducing the reader to the natural world. Here we examine the representation of turtles, terrapins and tortoises (Testudines) in 204 English language picture books and find a mean of 3.9 (SD 9.1) basic biological errors per book. Only 83 (40.7%) of the examined books…

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…

While it is well-established that listeners judge accents different from their own, and that this listener bias has pervasive consequences to the speakers, we have only offered a cursory attention to understand the nature of this accent bias. This paper explores listeners' judgments, ratings, and qualitative comments associated with psychosocial,…

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…

Previous research has highlighted the difficulty that infants have in learning to use color words. Even after acquiring the words themselves, infants are reported to use them incorrectly, or overextend their usage. We tested 146 infants from 5 different age groups on their knowledge of 6 basic color words, "red", "green",…

This study is designed to explore the role of second language (L2) English learners' working memory (WM), language proficiency, and age in the processing and comprehension of English anaphoric sentences. To this end, 40 EFL learners participated in the study. The proficiency levels of the participants varied from elementary to high-intermediate,…

Touch cues might facilitate infants' early word comprehension and explain the early understanding of body part words. Parents were instructed to teach their infants, 4- to 5-month-olds or 10- to 11-month-olds, nonce words for body parts and a contrast object. Importantly, they were given no instructions about the use of touch. Parents…

This study examined relations between children's false statements and response latency, executive functioning, and truth--lie understanding in order to understand what underlies children's emerging ability to make false statements. A total of 158 (2- to 5-year-old) children earned prizes for claiming that they were looking at birds even when…

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…