JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Wiley and International Reading Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Reading Research Quarterly. Eight readers reading: The intertextual links of proficient readers reading multiple passages T his study is about 8 readers reading. It focuses on the intertextual links these readers made reading across five passages. I begin by presenting background information about the study: the forces that motivated it, the approaches to intertextuality that inform it, and which of these approaches it builds upon and extends. I then present an analysis of the intertextual links made by the 8 readers, which illustrates how a cognitive construction of intertextuality helps us understand the types of links readers make across multiple texts. Finally, implications of these 8 readers' link making are discussed. Motivating forcesThis study was motivated by four forces, all of which reflect a concern with the single-passage paradigm that is deeply embedded in the way we view and practice reading. Acknowledging these forces shows how the study relates to problems articulated by others, and how the study builds on related work in addressing these problems. The first force comes from the practice of reading in schools, where reading lessons, instructional strategies, and postreading discussions have largely evolved around a single passage. Even though literatureand project-based unit approaches have long advanced the need for teaching students how to read across multiple texts, the evidence to date indicates that (a) very little of this instruction occurs in classrooms (e.g., Schmidt et al., 1985), (b) very few instructional strategies explicitly orient students to make cross-textual links (Crismore, 1985), (c) almost none of the questions in commercially prepared materials prompt students to make connections among texts (Akyol, 1994), (d) even when prompted to make links among texts, students make very few links (Rogers, 1988), (e) almost no coverage in professional materials is given to how to explicitly help students read across multiple texts (Lipson, Valencia, Wixson, & Peters, 1993), and (f) the curricular environment of most schools provides little support for sustained thinking about how texts relate (Wolf, 1988).The second force comes from reading assessment, where there is a small but growing interest in assessing readers' understandings of multiple passages (e.g., Hartman & Pearson, 1990). This notion of "intertextual" assessment stands in sharp contrast to conventional reading tests, which measure comprehension of individual passages.The third force comes from reading research, where there is concern that the instruments used in studies to measur...

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Twenty-two classroom teachers (grades 1 through 7) were interviewed to obtain information about how they use their social studies textbooks, the problems they experience, and their perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the texts. Teachers were also asked to describe the modifications or adaptations they made to help students who might have difficulty understanding the textbook. Results indicated that although teachers liked having the textbook as a resource, they were concerned about content and comprehensibility. Teachers tended to solve the problem of textbook difficulty in three ways: Helping students to cope with the textbook, deemphasizing the textbook, or reinforcing and extending textbook information.

This study examined the initial learning trajectories of 13 upper elementary teachers as they developed technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) while participating in a 7-month professional development program focused on integrating technology into their classroom practice. The program was collaborative and non-prescriptive: teachers worked on self-chosen summer projects with flexible support from a university-based partner. A descriptive multicase study design was employed to track teachers' learning progressions. Data included interviews, surveys, digital artifacts, and researchers' notes and memos. During the program, teachers developed varying degrees of TPACK. Analyses distilled six initial TPACK learning trajectories.

This study was an effort to establish the construct validity of measures designed to assess topical knowledge. We began with the assumption that the best way to find out how much people know about a topic is to interview them. The interview then became the criterion for validating three paper and pencil tests of topical knowledge. Elementary and junior high school students were interviewed to ascertain their knowledge about four topics; two weeks later they responded to three tests of topical knowledge. The results were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The correlations between the interview scores and the paper and pencil measures did not reveal a strong and clear relationship between the students' performance on the interviews and their performance on the tests of topical knowledge. This was an unexpected finding which led to further analyses (conditional probability analysis and case studies). The conditional probability analysis revealed that the interview and the paper and pencil tests provided different information regarding an individual's knowledge of a topic. These differences seem to be related to the difference between a recall and a recognition task. There was a high probability that if students gave information in the interviews, they would get that information correct on the paper and pencil tests (if it appeared there). Conversely, the probability was low that students would have mentioned in the interviews all, or even most, of the information that they got correct on the topical knowledge tests. We conclude from these findings that the information one gets of topical knowledge differs between interviews and paper and pencil measures. If the goal is to get the most complete picture possible regarding an individual's topical knowledge, then both interview and paper and pencil measures are necessary. If the goal is to assess only a specific body of information, then a paper and pencil measure might suffice; and, if the goal is to open a broader window on a student's knowledge, then an interview seems preferable. Looking across the few select cases that we analyzed in depth, we found that the interview approach captured individual differences more clearly and dramatically than did the paper and pencil tests of topical knowledge.Topical Knowledge -1