Purpose: In this article, we respond to Catts and Kamhi's (2017) argument that reading comprehension is not a single ability. Method: We provide a brief review of the impact of strategy instruction, the importance of knowledge in reading comprehension, and possible avenues for future research and practice. Results: We agree with Catts and Kamhi's…

Making inferences during reading is a critical standards-based skill and is important for reading comprehension. This article supports the improvement of reading comprehension for students with learning disabilities (LD) in upper elementary grades by reviewing what is currently known about inference instruction for students with LD and providing…

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has been the subject of debate for decades and alternative approaches to data analysis have been proposed. This article addresses this debate from the perspective of scientific inquiry and inference. Inference is an inverse problem and application of statistical methods cannot reveal whether effects…

Teaching from an informal statistical inference perspective can address the challenge of teaching statistics in a coherent way. We argue that activities that promote model-based reasoning address two additional challenges: providing a coherent sequence of topics and promoting the application of knowledge to novel situations. We take a models and…

We examine metonymy at psycho- and neurolinguistic levels, seeking to adjudicate between two possible processing implementations (one- vs. two-mechanism). We compare highly conventionalized "systematic metonymy" (producer-for-product: "All freshmen read 'O'Connell'") to lesser-conventionalized "circumstantial…

The role of working memory in vocabulary acquisition has been well established in the literature. In this study, we proposed and empirically tested the multicomponent view of vocabulary acquisition, which states that multiple language and cognitive skills are involved to facilitate phonological and semantic representations needed for vocabulary…

Nonnormality of univariate data has been extensively examined previously (Blanca et al., 2013; Micceri, 1989). However, less is known of the potential nonnormality of multivariate data although multivariate analysis is commonly used in psychological and educational research. Using univariate and multivariate skewness and kurtosis as measures of…

Two experiments are reported in which people resolve references to sets of entities (e.g., lies) that have previously been introduced either explicitly into a text ("the lies") or implicitly via a cognate verb (a form of the verb "to lie"). Previous work has show that pronominal references to such entities were judged as…

Depression is associated with biased interpretations and beliefs that are resistant to change. This kind of cognitive rigidity may depend on two distinct factors--a reduced ability for processing information that conflicts with these interpretations and beliefs and a reduced ability for generating alternative representations. Although depressive…

Intelligent tutoring systems can support students in solving multi-step tasks by providing hints regarding what to do next. However, engineering such next-step hints manually or via an expert model becomes infeasible if the space of possible states is too large. Therefore, several approaches have emerged to infer next-step hints automatically,…

Masterful teachers don't just ask a lot of questions; they ask questions in a purposeful way. In this article, Costa and Kallick describe five strategies that can help teachers become more purposeful in designing and posing questions. One strategy is to plan questions that elicit student thinking at various cognitive levels, from simple recall of…

This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

The Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) learning cycle improves understanding of the connection between empirical results and theoretical concepts when students engage in hands-on experimentation. This study explored whether training students to use a POE strategy when learning from social science texts that describe theories and experimental results…

Universidad Tecnológica de Santiago (UTESA) is a university considered as one of the highest ranking universities in the Dominican Republic, it is one of the few to be recognized by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology as an autonomous university for its constant research and updating. This university offers to college students…

We investigated the contributions of multiple strands of factors--individual characteristics (struggling reader status, working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, knowledge-based inference, theory of mind, comprehension monitoring), a text feature (narrative vs. expository genre), and question types (literal and inferential)--to one's…