Academy Modules: Modules developed for students in the three content areas are referred to as Academy modules. The instructor's modules are created for orientation purposes and are not intended for professional development. Rather, they are designed to convey information about Academy modules and how they can be integrated into teacher education programs.

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.

Background knowledge: A personal reservoir of information on a variety of topics; information retained in one's long-term memory.

Benchmark: With regard to a literacy curriculum, a specific statement of expected or anticipated performance at various developmental levels.

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.

Cognitive: Involving the process of knowing by thinking, comprehending, analyzing or evaluation. Example: Students use the cognitive process to be able to understand or gain meaning from spoken or written material by reasoning, making inferences, seeing relationships, etc.

Content Areas: OSEP has specified three content areas within the teacher education curriculum for the Academy to focus on. The content areas include reading, positive behavioral supports and technology in education. These are the content areas from which research-based interventions will be selected and transformed into instructional modules.

Content literacy: Listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills necessary to learn in each of the academic disciplines.

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.

Decoding: The ability relating a sequence of letters in print to their corresponding sounds, allowing the reader to translate the sequence into a word.

Directed Questions: A series of questions about lesson content has been included as a feature in each module. A question is presented. Once students enter their response they are able to access exemplary answers. This allows them to compare their response to responses prepared by the Academy staff.

ESOL teacher: An instructor who specializes in teaching English as a second language.

Early Literacy Project (ELP): A curricular approach designed to enhance student's knowledge of reading and writing and the role of text structure and strategic knowledge in the process.

Explicit: Completely and clearly expressed without ambiguity or vagueness; fully developed. Example: Explicit instructions would leave no doubt in your mind about what you were to do. Every part would be "spelled out."

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.

Fluency: In the area of reading, the skill of reading with accuracy, speed, and ease.

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; the profitable application of learned skills and strategies to new situations and tasks.

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.

Heterogeneous grouping: A way of organizing groups of students for instruction so that each group will have students with varying levels of achievement or ability, different ages, interests, etc.

Homogeneous grouping: A way of organizing groups of students for instruction so that each group will have students with similar levels of achievement or ability, similar ages, similar interests, etc.

Intensive instruction: A way of directing student attention in which sufficient time is spent in teacher-guided, interactive learning activities, and a high degree of goal-directed student engagement leads to student mastery and generalization.

Macrostructure: The overall organizational pattern of a text.

Menu: There are menus for each level and lesson in an Academy module. Links to the level menus appear in the center of the menubar. Access any level menu by clicking the level titles in the center of the menubar. Click the up arrow (top right) to access the menu for the current level or to go to the next higher menu level. For example, if you are viewing a page in a lesson the up arrow takes you to the current Lesson menu then to the menu for all Lessons then to the Table of Contents (ToC) for the entire module.

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.

Navigation: Navigation refers to the technical process of moving from one feature to another in an online module. The navigation system for Academy modules allows students to follow a critical path, but also to exercise flexibility when they wish to vary from the normal path of progressing through a module.

POSSE: An approach to reading comprehension that combines text structure mapping and reciprocal teaching. The steps include Predicting, Organizing, Searching, Summarizing and Evaluating.

Paraphrasing: A process that involves taking information from reading or listening and rephrasing the information in one's own words in a way that personalizes the information. This can facilitate one's ability to understand and remember the information.

Peer-assisted Learning Strategies (PALS): An approach used to strengthen both fluency in word recognition and comprehension in which students engage in partner reading, paragraph shrinking, and prediction relay.

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.

Proficient readers: Individuals who effectively and independently use skills and strategies to construct meaning from print.

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

Reciprocal teaching: An approach to reading comprehension which combines students' background knowledge, knowledge of text structures, and reading strategies with self-regulation in a socially interactive procedure.

Responsive instruction: A way of making teaching decisions in which a student's reaction to instruction directly shapes how future instruction is provided.

Scaffolded instruction: Instruction during which the teacher provides a student with just enough help to allow him to accomplish a task that he would be unable to accomplish without the help. As instruction continues, the student does more and more on his own until he can successfully accomplish the task without any help.

Scaffolding: A way of teaching systematically in which the teacher provides to students, early in the learning process, a significant amount of support in the form of modeling, prompts, direct explanations and targeted questions. Instruction during this phase is primarily teacher-guided. Then, as students begin to acquire mastery of the targeted objectives, direct teacher supports are reduced and the major responsibility for learning is transferred to the student. When students assume more responsibility, it is referred to as student-guided learning.

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-questioning: Identifying cues from information heard or read that make a learner wonder about who, what, when, where, which and why and ask personalized questions that relate to the information. The learner then reads to find the answers to these questions. Self-questioning can facilitate understanding and remembering. Good readers automatically self-question; weaker readers need to be taught to do this.

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.

Semantic map: A graphic structure that is focused on a single, central idea or concept from which all information radiates outward.

Speech-language pathologist: A trained professional who facilitates the acquisition of speech and language skills and strategies with students who have impairments in these areas.

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.

Strategic instruction: An educational approach aimed at providing rules or guidelines to help individuals approach tasks more effectively, efficiently, and independently.

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

Summarization: The process of concisely restating the essential ideas of a text or passage, and synthesizing the ideas into an overarching, or superordinate, idea.

Systematic instruction: A way of organizing learning experiences so that both the teacher and the student follow and continuously review a dynamic plan related to how new content will be learned and how that new content relates to past and future learning.

Table of Contents: Each module includes a general Table of Contents (ToC) covering the entire module. Click "ToC" in the top right of the menubar to access the Table of Contents

Text structure: Characteristics of written material; the way ideas in a text are constructed and organized. Includes overall framework or macrostructure as well as the structure of smaller segments of text related to the macrostructure (e.g., visual cues, signal words, cohesive devices and sentence level factors).

Title I teachers: Teachers who typically teach children who are at high risk for learning difficulties. Title I teachers are part of a federally funded education program called Title I that was established to help these students overcome these difficulties.

Transactional Strategies Instruction: A multifaceted and integrated approach to teaching strategic reading in which the reader is actively constructing meaning in collaboration with others and learning when, where, and how to use strategies. The strategies used in this approach are (1) predicting, (2) verifying, (3) visualizing, (4) making connections, (5) monitoring and (6) fix-it strategies.

Visual imagery: A strategic approach to aid comprehension, interpretation, and retention of information during which individuals create detailed pictures in their minds and link the images to the content being learned.

Word recognition: The ability to identify and read a word and understand its meaning.