Byeong-Young Cho

Reading: What Else Matters besides Strategies and Skills?.

How can we best contribute to our students’ reading development and achievement? What are the hallmarks of successful, independent student readers? An examination of reading curricula, reading assessment, and related Federal education policy reveals the ongoing emphasis on the cognitive strategies and skills of reading. The teaching and learning of the “big 5” of No Child Left Behind, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, are considered the hallmark of effective reading programs. The Common Core State Standards continue the focus on the cognitive aspects of reading. While strategies and skills are central to reading achievement, they are but one aspect of elementary students’ reading development. In this article, we examine other important influences on this development. We focus on metacognition, engagement and motivation, epistemic beliefs, and self-efficacy, and we describe how they can contribute to students’ reading success.

Competent Adolescent Readers’ Use of Internet Reading Strategies: A Think-Aloud Study

The purpose of this study was to investigate the type, pattern, and complexity of Internet reading strategies used by seven accomplished high school readers. Individual participants performed an academic Internet reading task with the goal of developing critical questions about their chosen controversial topic. Strategies for Internet reading were analyzed from the perspective of constructively responsive reading, both qualitatively and quantitatively, using participant-generated verbal reports complemented by recordings of their computer screens. The data described the nature and sequence of reading strategies that participants used to construct meaning, and the interplay of those multiple strategies in Internet settings. The results demonstrated that the participants’ Internet reading involved the iteration and modification of traditional print-based reading strategies (e.g., meaning-making, self-monitoring, information evaluation) and also the use of strategies characteristic of Internet settings (e.g., text location). Implications of the studys findings on Internet reading strategy use for theory and research are discussed.

Examining Adolescents’ Strategic Processing During Online Reading With a Question-Generating Task

Forty-three high school students participated in an online reading task to generate a critical question on a controversial topic. Participants’ concurrent verbal reports of strategy use (i.e., information location, meaning making, source evaluation, self-monitoring) and their reading outcome (i.e., the generated question) were evaluated with scoring rubrics. Path analysis indicated that strategic meaning making coordinated with self-monitoring and source evaluation positively influenced the quality of the generated questions, whereas information-locating strategies alone contributed little to the participants’ question generation. Further, source evaluation played a positive role when readers monitored and regulated their strategies for information location and meaning making. The findings on the interplay of metacognitive, critical, and intertextual strategies in online reading are discussed with regard to research and practice.

Conceptualizing and Assessing Higher-Order Thinking in Reading

Students engage in higher-order thinking as they read complex texts and perform complex reading-related tasks. However, the most consequential assessments, high-stakes tests, are currently limited in providing information about students’ higher-order thinking. In this article, we describe higher-order thinking in relation to reading. We provide a framework for understanding higher-order thinking in reading, in relation to relevant theories and research in reading, and standards and assessment initiatives. We conclude with the considerations in assessments of higher-order thinking in reading that can help teachers and students work toward attainment of the Common Core State Standards.

Introducing the Historical Thinking Practice of Contextualizing to Middle School Students

ABSTRACT This article describes the design of a social studies unit about the Johnstown Flood of 1889 with a particular emphasis on how specific unit resources engaged middle school students in learning about the geographical and historical context of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. We also report on how the resources supported the teaching and learning of the historical thinking practice of contextualizing.

“Were There Any Black People in Johnstown?” An Investigation of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Service of Supporting Disciplinary Literacy Learning in History

This case study describes how culturally relevant pedagogy can be used in disciplinary rigorous ways in an urban middle school history classroom. The focus is on a unit about the Johnstown Flood of...

Exploring bilingual adolscents’ translanguaging strategies during online reading

Bilingual adolescents actively participate in literacy practices on the multilingual Internet. However, research has paid little attention to these readers’ use of their linguistic knowledge and sk...