Technology and engineering functional literacy should be intentionally developed in the school system -- like any other competence, it does not develop spontaneously. For this purpose, a didactic model, the Metacognitive model for developing technology and engineering literacy (McM_T&E), was developed, implemented and evaluated. The results of…

A study compared the effects of four study strategies on at-risk sixth-grade students' comprehension and retention of main ideas and details in considerate and less considerate social studies text. The four strategies investigated consisted of the following two pairs: (1) mapping with and without instruction in identifying important details; and…

A study examined how students use their prior knowledge and experience to help them understand a text, and how that influences what they recall from the text. Subjects, 46 sixth graders from 3 elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, were tape recorded as they thought aloud while reading either a passage on "sugar" or a passage on…

This study evaluated effects of a direct instruction main idea summarization program and a self-monitoring technique on the reading comprehension of four sixth-grade students with learning disabilities. A multiple probe across student design was used. One student did not receive instruction and served as a control subject. Student performance was…

A study examined the effects of adjunct questions on learning. Subjects, 93 male and 78 female sixth-grade students from two junior high schools in small towns located in a largely agricultural region in the Midwest and whose mean grade equivalency on the reading sub-test of the Stanford Achievement Test was 10.2, were monitored by video cameras…

For its 53rd annual meeting, the Association of Educators and Researchers met in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Marriott Charlotte City Center. This year's conference theme was "Building Literacy Communities", which was also used as the title for this year's Yearbook, Volume 32. This organization has long been the home of some of the nation's…

A study examined how elementary school children spontaneously construct meaning when reading informational text. In particular, the study explored: what kinds of knowledge they draw on and how they use it to help them understand what they read; and how does what they do influence what they recall. Twenty-nine 6th graders from two elementary…

To investigate the higher level comprehension strategies used by children reading basal reader stories, a study compared the results of an earlier investigation of 50 fourth grade level readers' comprehension strategies with findings gained from 30 subjects using a sixth grade basal reader. Subjects were asked to read aloud from a basal and stop…

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…

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 study examined the linguistic strategies of strong and weak readers in grades three and six within the context of D. E. Rumelhart's interactive model of the reading process. A linguistic prediction task was set up to investigate students' use of orthographic constraints, syntactic redundancy, and syntactic and semantic knowledge. A program was…

To examine the role of phonetic code in memory, a study investigated the use of phonetic recoding strategies in fifth and sixth graders identified as good and poor readers. Subjects--120 students with IQ scores in the average range--were divided evenly between both grades. Thirty subjects from each grade who scored above the 50th percentile on the…

A study examined the pronoun miscues of 32 sixth grade and 24 second grade students reading short prose selections aloud. The miscue analysis led to the identification of text features readers use to assign pronoun reference, the strategies developing readers often employ, and the patterns of correction of pronoun miscues. Specifically, it…

The Virginia Reading to Learn Project is a state-wide project designed to help content area teachers at the middle school and secondary school levels teach their students how to comprehend their content area textbooks. Teachers learn instructional strategies and techniques within the framework of the total reading process incorporating reading,…

To understand better how readers learn and recall text information, a study examined one prose learning approach--the selective attention strategy (SAS)--in which text elements are processed, given various degrees of attention, and learned according to their perceived importance. Fifty sixth grade students from an inner city school in a large…