Incentive programs in the form of token economies (the granting of points or counters which can later be exchanged for tangible rewards such as free time, listening to records, or candy) are widely used in schools today. The Pizza Hut restaurant chain promotes a motivation plan called "Book It" with free pizza as the reward for increased…

To determine whether or not a statistically significant relationship existed between the learning styles and reading achievement of sixth-grade students in the State of Alabama a battery of four learning style inventories (Gregorc Style Delineator, Hunt Paragraph Completion Method, Renzulli-Smith Learning Style Inventory, and Carbo Reading Style…

A study examined whether the female superiority in reading achievement that exists in the United States is duplicated in a population that is genetically similar but culturally different from that of the United States. A sample of 4th and 6th grade students from Bielefeld, West Germany, and a sample of 4th and 6th grade students from Rialto,…

Ten reading skills were selected to represent literal, interpretive, and critical reading. An objective test was constructed for each of eight skills, and published tests were used for the remaining two. Complete data were available on 220 upper intermediate children. Using a series of multiple regression analyses it was concluded that a…

To determine the multivariate relationships of measures of convergent thinking, divergent thinking, and self-concept with reading achievement was the purpose of this study. Measures of verbal divergent thinking and self-concept were administered to 188 fourth and sixth grade students from an urban, lower middle class elementary school. Reading…

A study examined what children write when responding to literature they have read in school. The study investigated whether girls' writing differed from that of boys in the same classroom, as well as whether a classroom teacher responded differently to her children's journal writing based on gender or reading proficiency. One sixth grade class,…

A study investigated the relationship between reading achievement and predictive abilities for narrative text structure of 96 fourth grade and 70 sixth grade readers. The subjects (1) silently read incomplete stories and then told the rest orally, and (2) silently read stories that had parts deleted and then orally gave information they thought…

Reading achievement tests have been used to identify deficiencies in inner city, poor readers; however, they often do not provide information about encoding strategies which lead some children to academic success. Immediate memory and visual analytic differences which contribute to the success of skilled readers are isolated in this study using 20…

This research study used Vygotsky's (1978) "zone of proximal development" and Wertsch's (1979) "levels of social interaction" as an alternative to Markham's method for describing a child's awareness of implicit inconsistencies in an essay. Two different essays with implicit inconsistencies were read to 30 third-grade and 30…

Several applications of latent trait models in reading research are discussed, their nature reviewed, and two experiments presented as heuristic applications of the Rasch Model. Two studies of children's comprehension of selected anaphoric structures in prose were performed using both conventional and Rasch Model analyses. Twenty-six children…

A study was conducted to determine the relationship between processing load and ability to locate text segments containing intersentence contradictions. It was hypothesized that less able readers fail to exhibit comprehension monitoring skills because most tasks overload their processing capacity. Subjects were 87 fourth and sixth grade students…

Sixty-six grade six students were subjects in a study to evaluate the effectiveness of a direct instruction paradigm for teaching children the reading comprehension skill of main idea identification. Both experimental groups (strategy and basal) and the control group received eight lessons of 30 minutes each. All instruction occurred over a…

Nine elementary schools enrolling 852 sixth grade students participated in a study that examined the relationship between the organizational climate of elementary schools (whether the school was "open" or "closed") and the reading achievement of students. Each school's organizational climate was determined by administering the Organizational…

The cognitive and metacognitive knowledge of a proficient bilingual sixth-grade reader who was Latina was studied by comparing her reading processes with those of a marginally proficient bilingual reader and a proficient monolingual reader. Four key dimensions are identified that distinguish the proficient bilingual reader's performance. (SLD)

A series of six models were devised and tested to address the structure of elementary school achievement in language, work study, reading, and mathematics skills. The models were based on two assumptions: first, that information processing strategies of children would govern their basic skills performances; and, second, that the basic skills would…