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This article reflects a metaview of the work of the three research projects funded through the Institute for Education Sciences under the Reading for Understanding competition that addressed middle‐grade through high school readers (grades 4–12). All three projects shared the assumption that instruction is necessary for successful reading to learn just as it is for learning to read. Through multiple studies conducted independently, the three projects arrived at common themes and features of productive instruction for reading for understanding with adolescent readers. These common themes are elaborated with instructional examples and include the following: (a) Students purposefully engage with multiple forms of texts and actively process them, (b) instructional routines incorporate social support for reading through a variety of participation structures, and (c) instruction supports new content learning by leveraging prior knowledge and emphasizing key constructs and vocabulary.

The difficulties that students face when reading science texts go beyond understanding vocabulary and syntactic structures. Comprehension of science texts requires students to infer how these texts function as a unit to communicate scientific meaning. To help students in this process, science texts sometimes employ logical connectives (e.g., because, therefore) that serve as landmarks that students can use to create a mental model of the text. Yet, how often are logical connectives used to mark inferences in science texts, and what can teachers do to support their students when these connectives are absent? This article discusses the frequency and types of logical connectives in four science textbooks and illustrates the types of obstacles that science texts present for students in their inference‐making process. Further, this article offers teachers a practical strategy that they can use to apprentice their students into the ways that science texts function to communicate scientific concepts.

This article examines the effects of firm motivation (an intrinsic or extrinsic interest in their product) on perceptions of brand authenticity and anticipated product quality. Specifically, studies 1 and 2 show that an intrinsic motivation increases authenticity perceptions which, in turn, increase perceived product quality, even for negatively regarded products. Studies 3a and 3b demonstrate that motivation affects perceived product quality (through perceived authenticity) by influencing deliberate attribute-level inferences consumers make about the product, and Study 4 demonstrates that the positive effect of intrinsic motivation (through authenticity) disappears in the presence of objective product attribute information, when such inferences are no longer necessary. These findings suggest that authenticity perceptions are malleable, and they shed light on the mechanism through which brand authenticity leads consumers to anticipate that a brand’s products will be higher in quality.

This study investigates the extent to which students' use of different discussion strategies fosters a balance between attending to the technical elements of authored texts and responding empathetically. Because small‐group discussion is a common approach to literary study, the analysis focuses on two small‐group discussions of “Charlie Howard's Descent,” Mark Doty's poem about the murder of a young gay man by other young men in his community. The two discussions were parsed into episodes that were scored according to the extent that they displayed balance. Then, each student turn was analyzed in terms of the discussion strategies employed. The analysis suggests that the strategies of searching for meaning, contextualizing, and interpreting contribute to the most balanced readings. Noting author's craft can lead to overly technical readings, although it has the potential to be paired with other strategies to facilitate a more balanced discussion.

Recent studies have revealed that preschoolers' story comprehension is influenced by several basic as well as complex cognitive and linguistic processes. Among the abilities known to be relevant for young children's understanding of stories are the size of their vocabulary, their inference-making ability, and their working memory. In this study, we examine the role of other processes in explaining preschool children's story comprehension, in a sample of 257 Chilean kindergarten children from middle-income families. The processes we examine are comprehension monitoring, theory of mind, inhibition, and attention control. Mediation relations suggested by theory and previous research are examined between working memory and comprehension, through integrative processes, and between vocabulary breadth and comprehension, through vocabulary depth. We use two different measures of story comprehension to clarify the role that each predictor plays in different aspects of this complex skill. Results suggest that when the story comprehension measure requires construction of a coherent representation, vocabulary, monitoring, inferences, working memory, inhibitory skill, and attention, but not theory of mind, make a significant contribution. Effects of vocabulary breadth are mediated by vocabulary depth, and effects of working memory are partially mediated by monitoring and inferences. When story comprehension is measured through recall of isolated story elements, only working memory and vocabulary explain significant variance. Theoretical as well as practical implications are discussed.

Introduction: Transcendental realism, the philosophical perspective dealing with the existence of causal powers governed by universal laws of nature, provides a useful framework for research conducted in the social sciences, including the field of health policy and systems research. Transcendental realism has been criticized, however, for offering weak methodological guidance for conducting research. Consequently, realist-informed studies are deemed to be less robust and less transparent, particularly regarding data analysis and synthesis towards evidence generation. In particular, the extent to which retroductive theorizing, the central evidence generating activity in realist-informed research is applied remains unclear, mysterious, and esoteric. We aimed to examine the extent to which retroductive theorizing is applied and described in realist-informed studies. Methods: We conducted a summative content analysis of 311 manuscripts included in this study. The analysis involved the counting and comparisons of the four forms of inference-making methods namely deduction, induction, abduction, and retroduction. This was followed by interpretation of the underlying context in which they were used, for example, the identification and linking of relevant constructs towards the formulation of mechanism-based theories. Findings: We found that the explicit application and description of retroductive theorizing in realist-informed studies remain minimal and inadequate. Abductive reasoning was reported in only 09/311 (2.9%) of the studies while retroduction was reported in [21/311 (6.8%)]. Abduction and retroduction, although central to realist-informed research, are seldom explicitly applied and described in such studies whereas deduction and induction, while they are meant to support retroductive theorizing, continue to dominate the process of theory formulation. Conclusion: While retroductive theorizing is less formulaic, this study highlights further methodological inadequacies within realist-informed studies. We acknowledge that it is difficult to describe inferential logic in the abstract, but recommend that realist researchers should makes their retroductive theorizing an explicit activity illustrating their critical steps in concrete applications for improved transparency and trustworthiness.

In this paper I review, from the perspective of experimental research, studies that have examined how brands acquire cultural meaning, and suggest future research directions. McCracken’s (Journal of Consumer Research, 13, 1986 and 71) model of the meaning transfer process gained influence about thirty years ago, but experimental studies of the processes it posited have been limited in their scope. The review is organized around three questions. First, what should be the dependent variables: the types of meanings that can adhere to brands? Second, what have we learned from studies on the types of visual, sensory, and human cues that are the sources of particular types of brand meaning—our independent variables? Third, what do we know, and need to know, about the inferential and other processes through which consumers “take possession” of these brand meanings from these cues? The review concludes with a research agenda.

Based on the analysis of 620 think-aloud verbal protocols from students in grades 7, 9, and 11, we examined students' conscious engagement in inference generation, paraphrasing, verbatim text repetition, and monitoring while reading narrative or informational texts that were either at or above the students' current reading levels. Students were randomly assigned to read informational or narrative text, and each student read two texts in their assigned genreone accessible and one challenging. The research question addressed the combinations of text processes that best differentiated four groups of readers: (1) adequate comprehenders who read narrative and (2) informational text and (3) poor comprehenders who read narrative and (4) informational text. Canonical discriminant analysis (CDA) revealed that the four groups were best differentiated by two latent, underlying functions related to (a) a combination of inference generation in accessible text and paraphrasing in both accessible and difficult text (On-Level Inference/Paraphrasing) and (b) monitoring in both accessible and difficult text (Monitoring). Poor comprehenders who read informational text were significantly lower than the other three groups on On-Level Inference/Paraphrasing. Poor comprehenders in both genres were significantly lower on Monitoring than adequate comprehenders who read informational text. A second CDA further examining the effects of text difficulty identified one latent function primarily explained by inference generation (Inference). Text difficulty had a significant impact on adequate comprehenders' Inference in narrative text. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Inference-making is a central element of successful reading comprehension, yet provides a challenge for beginning readers. Text decoding takes up cognitive resources which prevents beginning readers from successful inference-making and compromises reading comprehension. Listening does not require any decoding and could therefore offer a less demanding context to practice inference-making. The present study examined whether stimulating inference-making in a listening context is more effective and less cognitively demanding for beginning readers than a reading context. In three experiments, Dutch second grade children read two narratives and listened to two narratives. Inference-making was stimulated by asking them inferential questions during reading or listening and we compared this to a no-questioning control condition. After each narrative, we measured cognitive load and comprehension. It was expected that inferential questioning would increase cognitive load and negatively affect reading comprehension, but positively affect listening comprehension. The results indeed showed that inferential questioning increased cognitive load, but did not lead to differences in performance on open-ended comprehension questions (Experiment 1 & 2). When measuring comprehension with a free recall protocol (Experiment 3), we found a negative effect on total recall in both the reading and listening conditions. Taken together, we found no support for the hypothesized interaction. This raises questions about the effectiveness of inferential questioning for reading and listening comprehension of beginning readers, and whether listening is a good modality for improving inference-making.

The primary goal was to expand our understanding of text-reading fluency (efficiency or automaticity): how its relation to other constructs (e.g., wordreading fluency, reading comprehension) changes over time and how it is different from word-reading fluency and reading comprehension. The study examined (a) developmentally changing relations among word-reading fluency, listening comprehension, text-reading fluency, and reading comprehension; (b) the relation of reading comprehension to text-reading fluency; (c) unique emergent literacy predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, letter name knowledge, vocabulary) of text-reading fluency versus word-reading fluency; and (d) unique language and cognitive predictors (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, theory of mind) of text-reading fluency versus reading comprehension. These questions were addressed using longitudinal data (two timepoints; mean age = 5 years 2 months and 6 years 1 month, respectively) from young Koreanspeaking children (N = 143). Results showed that listening comprehension was related to text-reading fluency at time 2 but not at time 1. At both times, text-reading fluency was related to reading comprehension, and reading comprehension was related to text-reading fluency over and above word-reading fluency and listening comprehension. Orthographic awareness was related to text-reading fluency over and above other emergent literacy skills and wordreading fluency. Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were independently related to text-reading fluency and reading comprehension, whereas theory of mind was related to reading comprehension but not text-reading fluency. These results reveal the developmental nature of relations and mechanisms of text-reading fluency in reading development.