Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

Background: Of the myriad of reading comprehension (RC) assessments used in schools, multiple-choice (MC) questions continue to be one of the most prevalent formats used by educators and researchers. Outcomes from RC assessments dictate many critical factors encountered during a student's academic career, and it is crucial that we gain a deeper…

This study synthesized impacts of integrated literacy and content-area instruction (i.e., science, social studies) on vocabulary and comprehension outcomes in the elementary years (i.e., kindergarten through fifth grade). A systematic search of the extant literature identified 35 (quasi)experimental studies. Random-effects models were used to…

Aim: We conducted two separate but related multiple baseline with alternating treatment single-case design studies to investigate the effect of the same reading intervention for students with autism spectrum disorder being implemented under different conditions. Method: We conducted a researcher-implemented study in a public school (Study 1) and a…

MOCCA is an online assessment of inferential reading comprehension for students in 3rd through 6th grades. It can be used to identify good readers and, for struggling readers, identify those who overly rely on either a Paraphrasing process or an Elaborating process when their comprehension is incorrect. Here a propensity to over-rely on…

This teaching tip aims to build awareness of using a text's structure as a framework for building students' reading comprehension. The authors detail the Framework for Accelerating the Strategic Comprehension of Text (FASCT) to support elementary students reading comprehension abilities by explicitly teaching students to use the structure of a…

Learning from text is a "constructive" activity in which sentence-level information is combined by the reader to build coherent mental models. With increasingly complex texts, forming a mental model becomes challenging due to a lack of background knowledge, and limits in working memory and attention. To address this, we are taught…

MOCCA-C is an assessment of adult reading ability designed for early diagnosis of reading problems, for formative assessment in reading intervention planning, for assessment of reading improvement over time, and for assessment of reading intervention outcomes. It uses both narrative and expository reading passages and it currently has four forms.…

To better understand the impact of using e-books on students' reading outcomes, we conducted a meta-analysis of 14 studies with students in grades K-12 published between 2007 and 2018. Findings revealed an average effect size across all studies and reading outcomes of 0.9 that did not differ significantly from zero. There was also no statistically…

Understanding the efficacy of evidence-based reading practices delivered in the Tier 1 (i.e. general classroom) setting is critical to successful implementation of multi-tiered systems, meeting a diverse range of student learning needs, and providing high quality reading instruction across content areas. This meta-analysis presents evidence on the…

Inferential comprehension is necessary to connect ideas in a text together in a meaningful manner. There have been multiple studies on inferential comprehension involving texts of different genres (narrative and expository), but not a coherent overview of the findings of inferential comprehension by genre. The purpose of this study is to provide a…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd-grade predictors of reading comprehension in bilingual children. Specifically, we evaluated the role that Spanish and English skills play in predicting English reading comprehension in 3rd grade. Method: As part of a longitudinal study, 248 bilingual children were…

This study investigated the relation between Dual Language Learners' (N = 90) vocabulary and grammar comprehension and word learning processes in preschool (aged 3-through-5 years). Of interest was whether: (1) performance in Spanish correlated with performance in English within each domain; and (2) comprehension predicted novel word learning…

When reading scientific text, readers must draw inferences when the author does not make relations explicit; readers also need to pick up on causal relations that the author "does" make explicit. We collected think-aloud protocols from 86 undergraduate biology students reading 7 brief, illustrated passages about the immune system. After…

An intelligent textbook may be considered to be an interaction layer that lies between the text and the student, helping the student to master the content in the text. The Mobile Fact and Concept Training System (MoFaCTS) is an adaptive instructional system for simple content that has been developed into an interaction layer to mediate textbook…