Considers if it is possible for fourth-grade teachers and their students to implement Collaborative Reasoning, an instructional frame that transfers much of the control over discourse to students, during their reading lessons. Shows that the teachers and students were generally successful at implementing the new instructional frame. (SG)

A study investigated properties of children's naturally occurring arguments. The arguments were sampled from transcripts of 20 discussions held in 4 fourth-grade classrooms. The principal findings were that children's arguments are filled with seemingly vague referring expressions; that the arguments sometimes do not contain explicit conclusions;…

Analyzes the structure of argumentative discourse produced when small groups of children discuss issues raised by stories they have read, examining the discourse from story discussions in two fourth-grade classrooms. Compares and contrasts two approaches of representing the structure of classroom arguments (the argument network and the causal…

Details two experiments that assessed the effect of vocabulary difficulty on three measures of text comprehension--free recall, summary recall, and sentence recognition. (FL)

Multiple regression was used to examine the relationship between the serial position and the rated importance of a proposition in a text and the probability of its appearance in free recall protocols. Eight passages were used in the study--four from a standard social studies textbook and four written for the study. Each passage was divided into…

Two experiments assessed the effect of vocabulary difficulty on three measures of text comprehension--free recall, summary recall, and sentence recognition. In the first experiment, the effect of differing proportions of rare-word substitutions were examined in 79 sixth grade students. It was found that a high rate of difficult vocabulary (one…

The "yes/no" method of vocabulary assessment requires students to indicate words they know from among a list of words and nonwords. Preliminary evidence gained from a study involving fifth grade students indicates that the method is superior in many ways to the multiple choice method of assessment. Analysis of "false alarms," cases in which…

Two experiments assessed the effects of text cohesion and schema availability on sixth grade children's comprehension of social studies passages that varied in vocabulary difficulty. The purpose of the experiments was to test the compensation hypothesis within the interactive theory of reading, which assumes that reading involves many…