Building Better Bridges: Teaching Adolescents Who Are Poor Readers in Eighth Grade to Comprehend History Text

Helping struggling readers to learn history content in middle school can be difficult due to heavy reading demands. In this study, researchers taught poor readers with and without disabilities in eighth grade to generate main idea statements; create, compare, and contrast paragraphs; and identify cause and effect relations, along with relevant multisyllabic word study and vocabulary, as they read history text. The 34 participating students included 14 with disabilities and 20 without disabilities, who scored below the 5th percentile in reading, on average. The results were compared across special education and English learner status and with 81 typical readers from the same classes who studied the same units of history. Treated students made significant gains in use of these strategies, and poor readers with and without disabilities performed similar to their typical reader classmates in two of the three strategies following instruction. The instructional routines for each strategy are described.

Comments on “On the Steadiness of Separating Meandering Currents”

Using integration constraints and scale analysis, van Leeuwen and De Ruijter focused on the steady aspect of the downstream flow in the momentum imbalance articles of Nof and Pichevin appearing in the 1990s and later on. They correctly pointed out that when the steady downstream flow is exactly geostrophic then it must obey the additional downstream (critical) condition (where u is the speed, g′ is the reduced gravity, and h is the thickness). They then further argue that this additional condition provides “a strong limitation on the generality of their results.” These results for steady flows have been incorrectly generalized by the typical reader to eddy generating unsteady flows, which was the focus of Nof and Pichevin. The current authors argue that, although the van Leeuwen and De Ruijter condition of is valid for a purely geostrophic and steady flow downstream, it is inapplicable even for the steady aspect of the Nof and Pichevin solutions because the assumption of a purely geostrophic flow (i.e., and ) was never made at any downstream cross section in Nof and Pichevin. Instead, the familiar assumption of a cross-stream geostrophic balance in a boundary current, which is slowly varying in the downstream direction, as well as time, has been made (i.e., , , and small but nonzero). Perhaps the current authors originally were not as clear about that as they should have been, but this implies that the basic state around which van Leeuwen and De Ruijter expanded their steady Taylor series does not exist in Nof and Pichevin; consequently, their expansion fails to say anything about both the time-dependent and the time-independent Nof and Pichevin. In the current authors’ view, the “strong limitation” that they allude to does not exist.

Reply by the authors to W. H. Mayne

Thank you for your comments. We agree with you on both points. The attenuation function of the earth is more correctly described in terms of dB per wavelength. In the process of trying to illustrate the power of and need for preemphasis filtering, we oversimplified our example. We originally wrote the paper and prepared the example for an engineering geophysics monograph where our audience would have been quite different than the typical reader of Geophycics.

News Media Competition under Conditions Favorable to Newspapers

Television's advantage as the medium with “immediacy” should be at a minimum where network TV's deadlines fall early, but in Eugene, Oregon, such differences are lost on the typical reader-viewer.