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We investigated the roles of classroom supports for multiple motivations and engagement in students' informational text comprehension, motivation, and engagement. A composite of classroom contextual variables consisting of instructional support for choice, importance, collaboration, and competence, accompanied by cognitive scaffolding for informational text comprehension, was provided in four-week instructional units for 615 grade 7 students. These classroom motivational-engagement supports were implemented within integrated literacy/history instruction in the Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) framework. CORI increased informational text comprehension compared with traditional instruction (TI) in a switching replications experimental design. Students' perceptions of the motivational-engagement supports were associated with increases in students' intrinsic motivation, value, perceived competence, and increased positive engagement (dedication) more markedly in CORI than in TI, according to multiple regression analyses. Results extended the evidence for the effectiveness of CORI to literacy/history subject matter and informational text comprehension among middle school students. The experimental effects in classroom contexts confirmed effects from task-specific, situated experimental studies in the literature.

This meta-analysis synthesizes results from expository text structure interventions designed to increase comprehension for students in kindergarten to grade 12 published between 1970 and 2013. Twenty-one studies were identified, 19 of which met criteria for a meta-analysis, including 48 studywise effect sizes that were meta-analyzed to determine (a) how effective expository text structure interventions are in improving comprehension and (b) what features of expository text structure interventions (e.g., number of text structures taught, type of implementer) are associated with improved comprehension outcomes. A random-effects analysis yielded a significant mean effect of .95 overall and a significant mean effect of 1 for researcherdeveloped comprehension measures. Moderator analyses indicated significant differences in student comprehension outcomes, favoring researchers as implementers, 11-20 hours of interventions, one or two text structures taught, and students in the elementary grades. Instructional features of expository text structure interventions and implications for research and practice are discussed.

This teaching tip outlines a comprehension strategy designed to support early primary students in reading to learn while learning to read. The strategy is born of the authors’ classroom practices and is designed to support young children in reading and understanding informational texts by facilitating close interactions between text and reader. Through its steps—Read, Stop, Think, Ask, Connect—the strategy supports beginning readers in recognizing and responding to the challenges that informational texts hold for reading and comprehending. The Read, Stop, Think, Ask, Connect strategy is designed to be used flexibly to account for the diversity of readers and of texts in early primary classrooms and encourages educators to consider students’ prior learning, text selection, and multimodal supports when connecting beginning readers with informational texts.

This article addresses approaches to differentiating instruction to meet the needs of students whose literacy needs, interests, and strengths vary widely. This article was designed to support classroom teachers who understand the importance of differentiating instruction, but are unsure of how best to design and implement differentiation within the parameters of the classroom. The article begins by defining differentiated instruction and discussing its importance, including the role of differentiation with respect to diversity and with respect to Response to Intervention (RTI). The remainder of the article describes in detail two examples of differentiated instruction in classroom contexts. Each example is followed by a discussion of the research and decision‐making underlying the teacher's approach to differentiation. The article concludes with common characteristics of effective differentiation.

In explaining the importance of critical literacy, this commentary suggests what teachers need to be able to do ‐ essential ‘repertoires of practice’ (Comber, 2006). These include making connections with students’ lives, enabling them to do the necessary research, exploring texts and practices, considering the social effects of texts and practices and imagining possibilities for making a positive difference. These ideas are illustrated with an extended classroom example.

The ability to analyze and evaluate online sources for credibility continues to be a universal concern. In a 2006 study by the University of Connecticut, seventh graders lacked the ability to discredit a hoax website about a tree octopus. Using the same website in this qualitative study, 68 elementary students shared rationales about the source's authenticity during an exploration of reliability reasoning. Student responses provided insight into the application of web literacy skills and highlighted a need for increased instructional emphasis on critical thinking and explicit modeling of reliability reasoning during online searches.

Educators are aware of the need to promote students’ academic language to support text comprehension. Yet, besides teaching academic vocabulary, many educators continue to ask, What would this instruction entail? Guided by a new framework known as core academic language skills (CALS), the authors’ research focuses on delineating core language skills that contribute to reading comprehension to make them more visible to educators and researchers. In this article, findings from two studies are integrated to argue for a mixed‐methods approach to advance academic language research and pedagogy. In study 1, the authors assessed upper elementary/middle school students’ CALS and quantitatively examined the association between CALS and reading comprehension. In study 2, the authors used qualitative methods to collect and analyze students’ oral reflections about academic language. Key findings from these studies and their implications for academic language pedagogy in today's schools are discussed.

The concept of close reading is an important consideration when addressing the Common Core State Standards. In addition, close reading permeates the CCSS and suggests a particular way of reading and responding to texts. Trying to help students become successful readers in both school based settings and in the world outside of school is still our primary goal as reading teachers. We need to develop our own understandings of the requirements for close reading in various contexts, be ready to demonstrate to our students what this type of reading entails, and provide resources and instructional support to ensure our students' success.

Academic language is frequently assumed to be especially challenging for students from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) and even more so for language-minority students. Due to their often especially disadvantaged position regarding socioeconomic background and exposure to the language of instruction, language minority students are considered to suffer from a double disadvantage when processing complex academic language. To test this assumption, the present study investigated the relationships between various academic language features and differential item functioning (DIF) in a reading comprehension test for language-minority students on the one hand and German monolingual students from low-SES families on the other hand. The analyses are based on data of 19,108 fourth-grade students who took part in the reading comprehension test of the German National Assessment Study in elementary school. Our findings indicate that both lexical and grammatical features of academic language correlate with DIF disfavoring language-minority students, with especially pronounced effects for long and complex words and average sentence length. For German monolingual students from low-SES families, fewer features were associated with DIF, and the correlations were generally smaller than for language-minority students. Findings are discussed in relation to the assumed double disadvantage of language-minority students in the comprehension of academic language.