Attribution: As used in this lesson, the belief about the cause of or factors contributing to academic success or failure; a student can be taught to attribute success in reading to a combination of personal effort, ability and strategy use.

Cognition: The process of knowing by thinking, comprehending, analyzing or evaluating. Examples: Students use cognition to gain meaning from spoken or written material by reasoning, making inferences, seeing relationships, etc.

Cooperative story mapping: A cooperative learning approach where groups of students work together to construct a story map, and the teacher concludes the exercise by leading a class-wide discussion to extend understanding beyond individual group discussions.

Corrective action: As used in this lesson, action taking by the reader to revise a strategy or select a new strategy to fix comprehension failures.

Expository text: A collection of written words that gives information, explains something or seeks to persuade. Most classrooms textbooks are expository - science, social studies, health, etc.

Generalization: An important part of self-regulation where a student is able to apply learned strategies to new situations and tasks in which the strategies could be applied profitably.

Goal-specific strategies: Procedures readers use to process specific material. Examples include predicting the outcomes, self-questioning, analyzing the text, visual imagery, using graphic organizers, paraphrasing, and summarizing.

Macrostructure: The overall organizational pattern of a text.

Metacognition: A person's reflection on his or her own thinking processes. By using metacognitive skills, readers are able to reflect on their own reading processes, for example, whether or not they understand what they read.

Metacognitive knowledge: The knowledge of how to monitor, adjust, and direct one's own mental processes for a desired result. With regard to reading, knowledge of how to monitor, adjust, and direct one's reading strategies to ensure reading comprehension.

Motivation: As used in this lesson, the force that propels students to develop metacognitive knowledge and use it to control, or self-regulate, reading behavior.

Narrative text: A collection of written words that seeks to entertain, display knowledge or skill, teach, organize and plan behavior, most frequently involving imaginative stories with a setting, characters and a plot. Examples of narrative writing: Little Women, A Tale of Two Cities.

Prior knowledge activation (PKA): A previewing strategy that teaches students to talk about how an idea they will encounter in the text relates to personal thoughts and/or experiences.

Reading comprehension: The process or result of gaining intended and personal meaning from written material.

Self-efficacy: With reference to reading, the belief in one's own competency to perform specific reading tasks.

Self-knowledge: With regard to learning, knowing yourself as a learner, what you are good at, what you need help with, and where you are likely to have difficulty.

Self-regulation: With regard to reading, the action taken by readers to help themselves take control and read more effectively by trying to understand the purpose for reading, selecting an approach, monitoring their comprehension, and, if necessary, adjusting or revising the strategic approach.

Story grammar: A schema or framework for the components of a story. In its simplest form, story grammar involves specification of the main character, his or her problem or conflict, his or her attempts to solve the problem and the chain of events that lead to a resolution. It also includes analysis of how characters react to the events and the articulation of the theme or themes.

Strategy: An individual's approach to a task; how a person thinks when planning, executing and evaluating the performance of a task and its outcomes.