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This study addresses the following questions: Does professional development (PD) designed to meet third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers’ pedagogical and content needs influence how teachers teach and engage with graphical devices found in social studies texts? If so, what effect does that instruction and engagement have on students’ comprehension of those devices and social studies reading materials that contain them? We worked with teachers and students in a context-embedded PD series that emphasized literacy skills specific to standards that address accessing and sharing information (Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts) as social studies specialists (e.g., historians, geographers, economists; C3 Framework), with a particular focus on the graphical devices commonly found in social studies instructional materials (i.e., captioned images, maps, tables, timelines). Using teacher interviews, curricular materials, field notes, and student pre- and post-assessments as data sources, we explain the impact of this intervention on teaching and learning.

The growing popularity of graphic novels for younger readers is hard to miss. This article provides specific ways to think about, recognize, and teach with multimodal texts that leverage student interest. In this English language arts unit, we taught a sixth‐grade class how to read and comprehend the complex design elements common to the graphic novel form. The class used both student‐selected graphic novels made available to them by the researchers and a whole‐class graphic novel, One Dead Spy by Nathan Hale. Teaching students how to effectively comprehend graphic novels is much like teaching anything: By identifying the content and strategies that need to be taught, we then identified the corresponding teaching strategies needed. This article reports on the content and strategies, specific ways to help students come to a greater understanding of the text in hand, and graphic novels as a literary form.

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The purpose of this study is to describe ways in which elementary students access information from various components of informational social studies texts in schools. Although the time devoted to elementary social studies has decreased considerably in recent years, a renewed focus on content-area literacy skills, driven by state standard initiatives, presents us with the opportunity to regain lost social studies instructional time by integrating social studies content during literacy instructional time. However, it is not entirely clear what this instructional time should entail. This paper describes how third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade children navigate various aspects of the written and graphical elements of informational social studies reading materials. Results indicate that when students are unable to correctly answer questions about the content of the reading materials, they primarily attempt to do so in one of four ways: (1) responding without the use of a discernable strategy; (2) extracting random information from the passage; (3) relying on prior knowledge; or, (4) extracting information from the correct aspect of text that is not responsive to the question. Based on researcher-developed reading assessments as data sources, we explain the challenges children encounter and make recommendations for elementary social studies instruction.