Automaticity: A general term that refers to any skilled and complex behavior that can be performed rather easily with little attention, effort, or conscious awareness. These skills become automatic after extended periods of training.

Base Words: Words from which many other words are formed.

Cooperative Learning: Involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks. It has been used successfully to teach comprehension strategies in content-area subjects.

Direct Vocabulary Learning: When students learn vocabulary through explicit instruction in both the meanings of individual words and word-learning strategies. Direct vocabulary instruction aids reading comprehension.

Engish Language Learner: A student whose primary language is not English and who has been identified to receive special English language instruction in school.

Fluency: The ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with proper expression and comprehension. Because fluent readers do not have to concentrate on decoding words, they can focus their attention on what the text means.

Generating Questions: Involves teaching students to ask their own questions. This strategy improves students' active processing of text and comprehension.

Humanities: Disciplines that study human cultures and expressions.

Integrative Learning: Moving beyond the course format to general open-ended kind of questions, or applying material learned in one course to issues in other courses.

Junior High: A general level of instruction classified by state and local practice as junior high, composed of any span of grades not below grade 6 and not above grade 9.

Learning: An exercise of constructing personal knowledge that requires the learner to be mentally active rather than passive; interpreting rather than recording information.

Liberal Education: Program designed to foster capacities of analysis, critical reflection, problem solving, communication, and synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines by providing students with an intellectual and social context for recognizing the continuity between the past and future and for drawing on reason and experience about human nature to develop and question values and to communicate the results of this process of thinking.

Multicultural Education: Course design principle based on the idea that cultural differences has consequences in the classroom, that some difference are privileged over others, and that educational reform is necessary to bring equity into education.

Occupational Education: Level of training less complex and theoretical than Professional Education but more so than Vocational Training, designed to prepare students for skilled crafts, usually but not always requiring licensure.

Professional Education: System of formal education that prepares novices for highly skilled occupations such as law, medicine, and engineering, through a combination of theory and practice culminating in an award of certification, licensure, or other formal credential.

Reciprocal Teaching: A multiple-strategy instructional approach for teaching comprehension skills to students. Teachers teach students four strategies: asking questions about the text they are reading; summarizing parts of the text; clarifying words and sentences they don't understand; and predicting what might occur next in the text.

Summarizing: A process in which a reader synthesizes the important ideas in a text. Teaching students to summarize helps them generate main ideas, connect central ideas, eliminate redundant and unnecessary information, and remember what they read.

Text Comprehension: Understanding what is read, with readers reading actively (engaging in the complex process of making sense from text) and with purpose (for learning, understanding, or enjoyment).
 
Ungraded: A school or class that is not organized on the basis of grade grouping and has no standard grade designation. This includes regular classes that have no grade designations, special classes for exceptional students who have no grade designations.

Virtual Classroom: Courses or entire degree programs delivered in whole or in part electronically via a combination of World Wide Web pages, Internet newsgroups, e-mail, Telnet, and video conferencing.

Writing Across the Curriculum: Pedagogical movement based on the concept that the faculty as a whole, not just one academic department, is responsible for students' writing skills.