A study examined the effects on comprehension of interspersing questions in text. The subjects, 103 seventh grade students in an urban school, were identified by scores on the California Achievement Test as either good or poor readers. They were then divided into four groups receiving the following treatments: passages without experimental…

The purpose of this study was to identify those factors which predict success in reading in the seventh year of school for children from a low socioeconomic level. Tests measuring reading readiness factors in kindergarten and reading achievement at the end of first grade were used as predictor variables, while a test of reading achievement at the…

A study explored the development of self-efficacy and outcome expectancy beliefs for reading and writing--examining specifically (1) the structure of the relationships both within reading and within writing, and the influences of writing beliefs on reading and reading beliefs on writing; and (2) the development of writing beliefs. Subjects were…

A study examined the effect of sustained silent reading and writing on the reading achievement, writing, and reading attitude of students reading two or more years below grade level. Subjects, 97 seventh graders and 104 eighth graders enrolled in a semi-rural, predominantly black, lower socioeconomic status, Southeastern school district, were…

Considerable research has been conducted on the effect of anxiety on academic achievement. The most consistent finding is that high anxiety is associated with low performance, particularly at the elementary school level. To explain this situation, some researchers have hypothesized that anxiety debilitates students' attention span or time-on-task…

This study compared the reading comprehension abilities of learning disabled (LD) students with the performance of both their age-peers and their reading-level peers. Subjects were 16 seventh- and eighth-grade LD students, 16 normal achieving eighth graders, and 16 normal achieving fifth graders. To assess the use of prior knowledge under varying…

A test measuring testwiseness was administered to 811 pupils in grades 3, 5, and 7 in the Tucson Unified School District. The pupils represented four ethnic groups: American Indian, Anglo, Black, and Hispanic. By controlling for reading ability using scores on a standardized reading test, the California Achievement Tests (CAT) or Comprehensive…

A study examined variables that affect the acquisition of automaticity of verbal skills. Among the variables examined were practice, novelty or familiarity of a word or word category, the speed and efficiency with which persons acquire automaticity, reaction time, and number of tasks performed concurrently. Subjects, 30 sixth and seventh grade…

A study examined the hypothesis that learning strategy coupled with efficacy-building teaching interactions would lead to greater strategic learning than learning strategy instruction alone. A reading comprehension strategy was taught to 184 students from 4 Los Angeles County (California) public and independent schools. Included were 65…

A study examined how students make specific inferences from prose passages. Subjects, 44 first- and second-year college students and 40 seventh-grade students, read 3 prose passages, each containing 6 inferential questions. The premise information for each question was expressed in one of six deductive inference forms: transitive, exclusive…

A study compared the comprehension abilities of readers when reading narrative and expository discourse. It was designed to investigate how middle-level high-achieving and low-achieving readers comprehend the two discourse genres, testing the readers' comprehension of main ideas in the text under both conditions. Also examined was whether…

Differences in reading achievement of bilingual and monolingual groups of fifth, sixth, and seventh graders were investigated in several Texas schools where the Czech-American culture was significant. Sixty-three bilingual students were compared with monolingual students who had Czech surnames or Czech-American backgrounds, on the basis of…

A Houston, Texas, elementary bilingual program did not produce consistently equal or superior cognitive outcomes but was effective in facilitating second language learning. In order to ascertain the effects of the program on participants' self esteem, English reading level, and grade point average (GPA), the elementary and seventh grade GPAs of an…

A longitudinal study was initiated in the Tuscon Unified School District (TUSD) to follow the achievement of seventh and ninth grade Title I students: (1) to investigate the suitability and difficulty of the Total Reading Test of the Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT) and the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS); (2) to compare the gains in…

A comparison of seventh and eighth graders' behaviors and achievement in K-8 and junior high schools shows K-8 students performing more favorably in all areas. Students in nine K-8 schools and nine junior high schools in the City School District of New York City were compared on reading achievement, attitude toward school, students' self-esteem,…