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Purpose – To provide educators with an overview of both generalized and specific comprehension strategies applicable to the content areas.Design/methodology/approach – The chapter is organized by (a) providing a rationale for incorporating reading strategy instruction, especially at the adolescent grade range and above; (b) discussing reading strategies that are appropriate for all content areas; and (c) describing reading strategies that can be used in specific content area subjects.Findings – Research-based strategies for scaffolding comprehension in content area subjects are presented in varying levels of detail.Research limitations/implications – The strategies discussed in this chapter do not constitute an exhaustive list of strategies or approaches to content area literacy instruction.Practical implications – This is a valuable resource for educators to obtain practical guidance in providing content area reading instruction for a wide range of student ages and abilities.Originality/value of chapter – This chapter provides significant research-based information for designing and implementing content area strategy instruction.

The Common Core Standards (CCS) for English Language Arts and College, Career, and Civic Life Framework (C3) require social studies educators to reconsider connections between literacy and history teaching. In this article we examine three perspectives on literacy teaching: content area literacy, disciplinary literacy, and critical literacy. While some scholars see these perspectives as contradictory or in competition, we demonstrate how content, disciplinary, and critical literacy teaching can complement each other and facilitate teaching to and beyond the CCS standards and C3 framework in intermediate, middle school, and high school history instruction. Our article includes teaching examples as well as appendices of teacher resources.

In an effort to counter the effects of the reduction of social studies instruction that has resulted from the pressure to increase test scores in reading and mathematics, many educators promote the idea of integrating the curriculum. For many modern elementary teachers, integrating the curriculum has become a means for infusing social studies content in the curriculum while maintaining the focus on teaching reading and language arts skills. This practice of teaching social studies or other content areas while maintaining a focus on reading differs widely from the original purpose of curriculum integration. The following article asserts that the true purpose of integrating the curriculum has been to create children who will be able to use the disciplines to advance democratic thought and life. They will be able to fully integrate the disciplines into their own thinking processes in order to confront issues and problems in a democratic society. This article explores notions of curriculum integration throughout history and examines the ways in which teachers attempt to integrate the curriculum in schools today.

Increasing reading achievement has become a nationwide priority resulting from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2005 (Dole, 2004). Due to this emphasis, coupled with the fact that an elementary school’s success is generally not correlated with test scores in social studies, teachers of the elementary grades find limited time to teach the social studies curriculum. However, in effort to combat this tragedy, elementary educators should be taught and encouraged to integrate content area teaching with literacy strategies. Using the appropriate.

Graphic novels can contribute to effective content area reading on social studies topics such as the American Revolution. This action research study’s purpose was to examine student recall of facts, enjoyment of reading, and interest in the topic when using graphic novels as compared to illustrated nonfiction prose in social studies content area reading. Twenty-two fifth grade students (13 females, 9 males) in a public school in a Midwestern state participated in the study. Half of the students read about the Boston Massacre and Patrick Henry through graphic novels and read about Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party with illustrated nonfiction texts, with the other half doing the opposite. The mean number of correct ideas recalled by students two weeks after reading two books in the graphic novel condition was 8.6 compared to 7.1 for the nonfiction prose condition with a medium effect size. Students rated their reading enjoyment significantly higher in the graphic novel condition indicating that graphic novels should be employed more often into the school curriculum. Suggestions for integrating graphic novels into the curriculum are provided along with other ways to take action.

Students enter college with the desire to make a positive impact on the world. They are also likely to enter higher education with literacy skills that need nurturing and support if students are to succeed in college and positively contribute to the world. Combining academic content and reading instruction in a service learning framework provides the focus for reading and action and uses students’ energy to solve problems. This chapter describes an educational approach that places reading and content learning in the service of the community. This approach includes explicit reading instruction, focused on introducing students to information literacy and reading strategies for common forms of texts aligned with the stages of service learning.

We contend that a major purpose of education is to prepare students to be active and critical partici-pants in our democracy. To facilitate this goal, students should acquire a repertoire of literacy skills that enable them to think critically about text and make judgments about what they read, skills that are transferable to their roles as citizens in a democracy. This topic is particularly relevant to social studies educators because they expect students to learn a great deal of content through reading. In this article, we present our view of the essential elements of democracy, along with a list of criteria and questions closely related to these elements. The list provides a framework for teachers to use in analyzing and modifying content area literacy strategies. The article also illustrates the democratic and theoretical underpinnings of several literacy strategies that can be used in the social studies classroom.

Research over the last decade or so has made it clear that quality teachers matter to student achievement. What is less clear is the ways in which they matter and how we can prepare such high-quality teachers. Nowhere is this lack of clarity more evident than in special education, where we have few studies on teacher quality and even fewer studies on the type of preparation opportunities that would lead to high quality. Thus, it is difficult to make evidence-based decisions about how quality special education teachers should be defined and prepared. As a field, we have to turn to research in general education to provide a sense of some of the dimensions of teacher quality and effective teacher education. In this chapter, we provide a summary of the research on characteristics of highly qualified teachers and what we know from the research on teacher education and professional development that might foster these qualities, both in general and in special education. Part of our discussion centers on the concerns surrounding this body of research and the challenges of applying the findings to the field of special education. Although these challenges pose considerable problems, we are optimistic that potential solutions exist and can be reached through an alignment of initial teacher education and induction.

Purpose: To present small cases of teachers who undertook inquiry-based collaborative work to implement and refine disciplinary literacy instruction in various content areas.

Design: Disciplinary literacy is explored alongside best practices in teacher professional learning, since disciplinary literacy is an instructional shift. This chapter addresses the question of how teachers might use an exemplary collaboration process to identify and test promising disciplinary literacy instructional practices.

Findings: Findings from various research projects point toward inquiry and collaboration as promising mechanisms for refining instruction to make it more disciplinary in purpose and implementation.

Practical Implications: The authors argue that disciplinary literacy is a relatively new conception of literacy skills in various content areas, and therefore jumping immediately to exemplary practices is unwise. Instead the authors recommend collaboration and inquiry as tools to generate and refine practices thoughtfully over time.

This chapter reviews successful pedagogical interventions in teaching literacy in languages of teaching and learning in the upper primary grades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and explores how researchers and teachers decolonized classroom spaces to ensure student achievement of learning outcomes. Themes emerging from the analysis of data are biliteracy interventions, interventions in official and national languages, teacher professional development, and ecological interventions. Results of the review indicate that researchers decolonized classroom spaces by using student linguistic repertoires, evidence-based pedagogical strategies student cultural capital and engaging families and communities. The review also reveals that more research needs to be conducted on teaching and learning in upper primary grades. The linguistic diversity of LMICs provides rich contexts for more research in bilingual education and L2 acquisition which could be useful worldwide as stakeholders in the education process explore the best ways to improve learning outcomes in schools.