Successful Internet reading requires making strategic decisions about what texts to read and a sequence for reading them, all in accordance with readers' goals. In this paper, we describe the process of realizing and constructing potential texts as an important and critical part of successful Internet reading and use verbal report data to…

Investigates main idea instruction in three basal reading series. Finds statistically significant differences in main idea instruction for the parameters "main idea task" and "acknowledgement of strategies mediating main idea task." Determines that basal reader materials rarely encourage students to monitor their main idea…

Investigates prediction instruction in three basal reading series. Finds that many basal reader materials do not contain explicit definitions of predictions, nor do they provide rationale statements related to prediction instruction. Discusses implications for prediction instruction in basal readers. (RS)

Enumerates results of a study which asked graduate students and doctoral candidates to read in diverse content areas and to select main idea statements for text. Concludes that readers often made initial hypotheses about the main idea and used the main idea construction processes of listing, draft and revise, and topic/comment after the text had…

Examines the influence of prior knowledge and text genre on prediction strategies of eleventh grade and graduate student readers. Finds that readers' prior knowledge may significantly influence the nature of readers' prediction strategies. Uses qualitative analysis of verbal report data to examine variation in types of prediction strategies.…

A series of three studies examined the influence of prior knowledge on expert readers' main idea construction processes. Eight expert readers read texts from familiar and unfamiliar content domains, and gave verbal reports of the processes they used for constructing main ideas. Five distinct main idea construction processes were reported: (1)…