In the early elementary grades, teachers use informational trade books and opportunities for students to interact with data to build students' understanding of science concepts. Teaching students how to read and comprehend these informational and data texts will help them learn scientific concepts and develop a better understanding of their world. However, to do so, we need research that describes what students do with these texts, particularly the strategies they employ and the resources they draw upon, and how their strategy use relates to their comprehension and prior knowledge. This knowledge is crucial to developing instructional approaches that directly impact students' facility with these specific texts.

This study speaks to this issue by investigating how third grade students interact with informational and data science texts. Specifically, I investigated the various strategies third grade students use when reading text similar to that found in informational science trade books and scientific data, focusing on the particular types and frequency of inferences they generated while doing so. In addition, I examined how differences in text type, topic, and students' prior knowledge are related to students' strategy use and their text comprehension. This research provides empirical evidence to show how students read and comprehend subject-specific texts and serves as a beginning step to determine how to best support students in understanding these texts.

A sample of 84 third grade students reading on or above grade level read four informational and data texts across two science domains (sound and plants). The informational texts focused on providing information about scientific phenomenon, specifically how sound is made and how plants grow, while the data texts presented scientific data related to the same topics and phenomenon. The study used think-aloud protocol methodology to capture the students' thinking as they read the texts. I conducted knowledge assessments to determine students' background knowledge related to sound and plants and asked students comprehension questions after they read each text.

Findings show that students used particular strategies, mainly inferences and paraphrases, to comprehend these texts and text genre, topic, and students' prior knowledge influenced their text interactions. These findings suggest that we need to move beyond thinking about text genre as simply the structural features of the texts and consider a broader definition of text genre to understand how students interact with and comprehend science texts. In particular, findings suggest that we need to more thoroughly consider the importance of students' prior knowledge and the nature of the science content that is represented in the texts to understand the strategies students employ during reading and their comprehension of these science texts.