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\"Presents cutting-edge, evidence-based interventions for dealing with specific difficulties of reading comprehension in children aged 7-11. An in-depth introduction to the 'poor comprehender profile', which describes children who despite being fluent readers have difficulty extracting meaning from text. Sets out a range of practical interventions for improving reading skills in this group - along with comprehensive guidance on assessment and monitoring, and insightful accounts of professionals' experience in delivering the techniques described. Includes an overview of psychological theories of reading comprehension, evaluating their practical applicability.\"-- Provided by publisher.

Reading mathematical texts is closely related to the effort of the reader to understand its content; therefore, it is reasonable to consider such reading as a problem-solving activity. In this paper, the Principle of Mathematical Induction was given to secondary education students, and their effort to comprehend the text was examined in order to identify whether significant elements of problem solving are involved. The findings give evidence that while negotiating the content of the text, the students went through Polya's four phases of problem solving. Moreover, this approach of reading the Principle of Mathematical Induction in the sense of a problem that must be solved seems a promising idea for the conceptual understanding of the notion of mathematical induction. (DIPF/Orig.).

The authors examined how information relevance affects readers' understanding of conflicting information in multiple documents and how relevance affects the processing of conflicting information on a moment-by-moment level. Sixty-four undergraduate students read a set of documents about a medical topic containing three intertextual conflicts addressing subtopics that were either highly relevant or irrelevant to the readers' task. Eye movements were recorded during reading, and afterward, readers' memory for conflicting information and their ability to apply their knowledge about the conflicting information was assessed. Relevance had a powerful influence on readers' understanding of conflicts between multiple documents: Readers for whom the intertextual conflicts were relevant remembered conflicting information better and reported conflicts more frequently than readers for whom the conflicts were irrelevant. The time course of this effect revealed that relevance exerts its influence only during a later stage of processing. Readers appear to initially detect conflicts regardless of their relevance, but only readers for whom conflicts are relevant invest the additional regulatory effort needed to include them in their mental representation. (Abstract übernommen).

Wissensvermittlung basiert im deutschen Schulsystem oftmals auf Schriftsprache. Daher sind Sachtexte in Schulbüchern nach wie vor ein zentrales Medium zur Wissensvermittlung im Fachunterricht an (Grund-)Schulen. Oftmals übersteigt die Komplexität dieser Schulbuchtexte jedoch die Lesekompetenz der Lernenden, speziell derer mit gering ausgeprägter Lesekompetenz. Folglich führen Defizite im Lesevermögen potentiell zu Schwierigkeiten im Lernprozess. Eine Möglichkeit das Textverständnis in solchen Fällen zu unterstützen, ist die sprachliche Entlastung der Texte. Seit einigen Jahren wird in diesem Zusammenhang das Konzept Leichte Sprache als Möglichkeit zur Unterstützung von schwachen Leser:innen diskutiert. Für den vorliegenden Beitrag wurden daher empirisch fundierte Regeln Leichter Sprache zur Entlastung von Schulbuchtexten eingesetzt. Es wurde untersucht, wie sich diese Vereinfachung auf das Textverständnis von 436 Schüler:innen der dritten bis sechsten Jahrgangsstufe auswirkt. In den Ergebnissen zeigt sich, dass die nach empirisch fundierten Regeln Leichter Sprache entlasteten Schulbuchtexte von den Schüler:innen der Stichprobe signifikant besser verstanden wurden als die Originaltexte und dieser Entlastungseffekt in allen Jahrgangsstufen ähnlich stark ausfiel. Erwartungswidrig konnten keine differentiellen Effekte für unterschiedliche Lesekompetenzniveaus der Schüler:innen gefunden werden. (DIPF/Orig.) In the German school system, knowledge transfer is often based on written language. As a result, expository texts in textbooks remain a central medium for teaching in elementary schools. However, the complexity of these texts frequently surpasses the reading abilities of students, particularly those with lower reading skills. This can lead to challenges in the learning process. One approach to support text comprehension in such cases is to simplify the texts. In recent years, the concept of ‘Leichte Sprache’ (Plain Language in German) has been explored as a tool to support struggling readers. In the present study, empirically based rules of ‚Leichte Sprache‘ were applied to simplify textbook texts. The impact of this simplification on text comprehension was assessed among 436 students in grades three to six. The findings revealed that the simplified texts were significantly better understood than the original versions, with students across all grade levels benefiting equally from the simplification. Contrary to expectations, no differential effects based on the students’ reading skills could be found. (DIPF/Orig.)

This issue of special issue of Reading and Writing brings together research on individual as well as textual factors that affect readers’ attention to and consideration of source information. In what follows, we will contextualize the research from this special issue by briefly reviewing the recent rise in research on “sourcing”.

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more complex than positive-causal ones. Therefore, they require greater cognitive effort during text comprehension and are acquired later in language development. The present cross-sectional study tested these predictions for German primary school children from Grades 1 to 4 and adults in reading and listening comprehension. Accuracy data in a semantic verification task support the predictions of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach. Negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more demanding than positive-causal ones. Moreover, our findings indicate that children's comprehension of negative-causal coherence relations continues to develop throughout the course of primary school. Findings are discussed with respect to the generalizability of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach to German. (DIPF/Orig.).

Im Rahmen des Artikels wird das Rahmenkonzept zur Messung von Lesekompetenz über die Lebensspanne im Nationalen Bildungspanel (NEPS) skizziert. Dabei werden zwei zentrale Dimensionen dieser Rahmenkonzeption, (a) Textfunktionen bzw. Textsorten und (b) kognitive Anforderung der Leseitems, im Detail dargestellt und vor dem Hintergrund relevanter theoretischer Modelle und Forschungsbefunde diskutiert. Zudem werden Ergebnisse einer Pilotstudie berichtet, die die Angemessenheit des Lesekompetenztests für die Forschungsintentionen des NEPS basierend auf Analysen zur Dimensionalität und Schwierigkeit der Lesekompetenztests auf Basis einer Stichprobe von 447 Erwachsenen darstellen. Spezieller Fokus des Beitrags ist dabei die Frage, ob Textsorten und kognitive Anforderungen als strukturelle Elemente der Rahmenkonzeption insofern angemessen sind, als dass beide (auch) im Erwachsenenalter erlauben, hinreichend zwischen guten und schwachen Lesern zu differenzieren. Zudem werden Ergebnisse zur Dimensionalität des Lesekompetenztests dargestellt. Basierend auf einem Vergleich eines eindimensionalen und zwei unterschiedlichen mehrdimensionalen Modellen gehen wir der Frage nach, ob Textsorten und/oder kognitive Anforderungen der Items separate Dimensionen der Lesekompetenz ausmachen oder die im NEPS gemessene Lesekompetenz - wie intendiert - als eindimensionales Fähigkeitskonstrukt aufgefasst werden kann. Die Ergebnisse werden vor dem Hintergrund der Möglichkeiten und Limitationen des Lesekompetenztests des Nationalen Bildungspanels und der relevanten Forschungsliteratur zur Lesekompetenz diskutiert. (DIPF/Orig.). This article sketches the framework for assessing reading competence across the lifespan in the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). It gives a detailed presentation of the two central dimensions in the framework: (a) text functions and text types and (b) the cognitive requirements of reading tasks. These are discussed against the background of relevant theoretical models and research findings. A pilot study of 447 adults is reported that analyzed the dimensionality and difficulty of the reading competence test for adults. Results indicated that the test meets the NEPS research goals. The article focuses particularly on whether text types and cognitive requirements prove to be appropriate structural elements for the framework, that is, whether each distinguishes sufficiently between good and poor readers. Results also report on the dimensionality of the reading competence test. A comparison between one unidimensional and two different multidimensional models examined whether the text types and/or cognitive requirements of the items/tasks are separate dimensions of reading competence, or whether the reading competence measured in NEPS can - as intended - be conceived as a unidimensional construct. Results are discussed against the background of the scope and limitations of the NEPS reading competence test and the relevant research literature on reading competence. (DIPF/Orig.).

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more complex than positive-causal ones. Therefore, they require greater cognitive effort during text comprehension and are acquired later in language development. The present cross-sectional study tested these predictions for German primary school children from Grades 1 to 4 and adults in reading and listening comprehension. Accuracy data in a semantic verification task support the predictions of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach. Negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more demanding than positive-causal ones. Moreover, our findings indicate that children's comprehension of negative-causal coherence relations continues to develop throughout the course of primary school. Findings are discussed with respect to the generalizability of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach to German.

Self-regulated reading is an effective approach to foster reading comprehension, but many teachers are insecure about how to support strategic reading in natural classrooms. For a successful implementation of self-regulated reading into language and content area teaching discipline-specific strategy-oriented reading instruction has to be defined. This study analyzes teachers' perspectives (N = 231) on the instruc-tion of self-regulated reading in German language teaching, biology, and mathematics classes. The study reveals subject differences (e.g. the frequency of cognitive strategies in class), but also commonalities between subjects (e.g. the instruction of cognitive strategies and the frequency of metacognitive strate-gies, the activation of resource management strategies). The perspective on teachers' discipline-specific reading instruction sheds light on content-specific as well as also cross-curricular reading instruction rou-tines. (Orig.).