This article does a very nice job of summarizing techniques for helping students to pull understanding out of reading. In particular, it does a very concise summary of how prereading, guided reading, and post reading activities might help a student to "read to understand."
Where the article falls short is in supporting the argument that math and science teachers should at least sometimes promote structured reading assignments over the more common directed instruction model as a means of presenting class material. I feel that there is perhaps an argument to be made for this, but it certainly wasn't made in this article.
The last section on "Writing-to-learn" did make me think a bit about how this idea could be applied in my own classroom. In particular, I have begun to notice that while most of my students take notes in class (a form of "writing to learn"), most of them aren't really very good at it. For instance, their notes rarely have more than what was put up on the board, and the reasoning behind all of the different steps performed is rarely recorded.
I definitely think that a lesson on note taking in class could help students to learn the material better by making them think more about what they are putting down (and why) as they are taking notes. Perhaps this could even be extended to the idea of a "math journal", which would be a living document that they would work on as their understanding evolves.Reading, Writing and Understanding