Increasing numbers of students now attending college lack the reading and study skills necessary for mastery of content area material. One approach to solving this problem is using learning assistance personnel as consultants to content area instructors. Some specific reading and study techniques that learning assistance instructors can help…

Discusses concept learning in the content areas, focusing on a system for integrating vocabulary into cognitive teaching goals. (AEA)

Describes a model for a comprehensive reading program that identifies critical elements of a program and their relationship to one another. (MKM)

Presents a readability formula suitable for passages from 40 to 99 words (provided they contain at least 3 sentences). (RS)

Describes specific problems that students encounter when they begin the transition into content area studies. Examines a recent research summary on study skills for suggestions about how to address these problems. (MM)

Examines several current nonfiction books that can expand a child's knowledge of a wide variety of subjects, noting that the breadth of a child's knowledge base affects his or her reading development. Subjects discussed include dinosaurs, animal preservation, insects, ecology, history, and drugs and alcohol. (SM)

Examines comprehension and summary writing skills of fifth-grade Chamorro students in Guam who received instruction in the Guided Reading Procedure with an added summarizing step. Suggests that additional teacher instruction is needed to improve student understanding of the content area material. (NH)

Discusses ways a middle school reading specialist worked with fellow faculty members to promote reading strategies for independent reading in all content areas. (SR)

These suggestions for helping adolescent students with mild disabilities take notes emphasize use of a skeleton outline of the main ideas and related concepts of a lecture, with space to maximize student responding as the student completes the outline during the lecture or reading of an assigned chapter. (DB)

This paper examines the problem of content reading by elementary school age children and gives teachers advice to facilitate learning of expository text. Armbruster, Anderson, and Ostertag (1987) identified some of the difficulties students have with content reading to be lack of interest, lack of motivation, and insufficient prior knowledge.…

Presents an annotated checklist that reading specialists can distribute to all teachers describing services that the reading specialist can perform. (MKM)

Provides seven recommendations for an effective secondary reading program that will treat reading as a body of skills taught in all subject areas. (MKM)

Argues that reading resource specialists can show content area teachers how to create an atmosphere of support, modeling and guiding students to become strategic readers who gain control of their own learning. (RS)

The article provides an overview of the study skill proficiency (or lack of it) of students with learning disabilities followed by the presentation of 15 study skill strategies. It concludes with a discussion on the implementation of a study skills program including guidelines. (Author/DB)

Describes how an excerpt from an electronics magazine challenged the author to examine problems in reading comprehension. Notes the sources of difficulty in understanding demanding text, and states that prior knowledge--not isolated comprehension skills--is necessary to create meaning from a text. (MM)