This article describes a cognitive strategy designed to enhance middle school students' comprehension of social studies texts and reports its implementation in social studies classrooms. The PEP road map instructional framework is intended to help social studies teachers scaffold the reading and writing experiences of at-risk students as they interact with social studies textbooks. Implementation by middle school students indicated an academically significant increase in reading comprehension for all students, improved metacognitive ability, attention to information contained in texts, and confidence in ability to grapple with ideas in authentic texts. Students can be taught to activate and refine their reading comprehension skills as they engage in meaningful encounters with conceptual ideas about social studies. Content-area teacher responses to the implementation of the strategy in their classrooms were encouraging.
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