Focusing primarily on reading and writing, this book presents summaries of state-of-the-art theory and research dealing with academic competence in school. The editors thoroughly utilize both information-processing and social-collaborative models as interventions. An enlightening final section discusses how this research could better prepare educators to teach reading and writing. It examines the role of NP-movement vs. lexical rules in accounting for alternations in grammatical functions. It presents the role of the lexicon in syntactic theory. It offers debates between major practitioners...

Based on research from the National Reading Research Center (NRRC) at the Universities of Georgia and Maryland, this issue presents the contributors' sythesized work on reading motivation and engagement. Articles are devoted to the following topics:
* the general motivation constructs related to reading;
* home influences on reading motivation;
* readers' responses to different types of text;
* influences of classroom contexts; and
* types of assessment on children's motivation.

Concept Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) is a unique, classroom-tested model of reading instruction that breaks new ground by explicitly showing how content knowledge, reading strategies, and motivational support all merge in successful reading instruction. A theoretical perspective (engagement in reading) frames the book and provides a backdrop for its linkage between hands-on science activities and reading comprehension. Currently funded by the Interagency Educational Research Initiative (IERI), this model has been extensively class tested and is receiving national attention that...