Previous meta-analyses highlight the role of executive functions (EF), encompassing working memory, task-switching, and inhibition, in reading comprehension, but have not demarcated its role in decoding, defined as use of orthographic patterns to access oral pronunciations. According to the dual-route model, decoding involves parallel activation…

This case study involved a deep reading intervention, creating a way to bridge theories of contemplative practice and mindfulness into classroom practice. Participants were graduate students enrolled in Reading Literacy and Content Methods, a capstone course for teacher licensure before their practicums. The students were led through a deep…

The most important skill teachers can communicate through reading experiences is the awareness of what kinds of questions to ask with different kinds of texts. These questions are not the factual questions that drift in and out of short term memory but the implicit questions, the thought-provoking "big questions." Some teachers…

The purpose of this study was to determine the disruptive effect of unknown words on reading and to examine this effect in relationship to grammatical position and modification type. Forty second grade children from two different lower middle class, semirural schools were randomly assigned to the standardization group or the experimental group.…

This paper discusses the reading diary study--a method that involves frequent observation and detailed note-taking of the strategies employed by a child while learning to read--and the problems of data reduction, limitations of methods employed by researchers, and analysis of data. The sections include "Miscue Analysis," which can be…

In an investigation similar to the early Secor (1900) and Pintner (1913) studies, a verbal distractor was used to demonstrate that comprehension of written materials, though reduced, was not completely disrupted when mature readers engaged in an irrelevant articulation exercise. Twelve undergraduate and graduate subjects participated in two…

Teachers and their students can benefit from examining the role of professional editors and their response to writing. The editor's role lies primarily in giving service to the writer, the reader, the publishing house, and the power of the written word. Editors like Harold Ross and Max Perkins have evoked the trust of many writers by making sure…

A study compared text-connecting inferencing and text integration skills of hearing-impaired (HI) students who had surpassed the documented fourth-grade plateau in reading comprehension with those who had not. These groups were also compared to skilled and less-skilled normal-hearing (NH) fourth graders. Subjects read a four-page narrative and…

This paper reports on an innovative approach to the teaching of reading. The thrust of the approach lies in application of findings from Meeker's research which since 1963 had identified certain clusters of Guilford's Structure of Intellect and intellectual abilities found to be necessary in the process of learning to read. Several programs are…

To examine the comprehension process employed by gifted readers and to identify the various metacognitive strategies they employ, 100 gifted student volunteers in grades 4 through 7 were administered the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS), Reading Subtests 11 and 13. The students also completed a questionnaire to determine metacognitive awareness…

This study hypothesized that altering a news story to conform to a more familiar structure might increase comprehension and recall. Subjects, 104 undergraduate students, completed a Media Use Survey, a questionnaire for collecting demographic information, the WIRE test, a strength of text schema measure, and a comprehension questionnaire. Students…

A study was conducted to explore readers' ability to identify information of high and low importance. Specifically, the study explored (1) whether the ability to prioritize or structure information in texts was consonant with proficient reading, (2) whether the ability to prioritize information from texts was dependent upon the memory capacity…

Based upon a theory of intelligence proposed by Alfred Binet, this paper describes a cognitive process approach to poetry instruction. After discussing the suitability of the study of poetry as a means of enhancing students' reading comprehension, the paper summarizes Binet's theory, which distinguishes four successive intellectual operations: (1)…

A reader's ability to recognize an author's top-level structure in a passage is a useful strategy for organizing textual information for memory purposes. Even without specialized training, many adults and some fifth grade children have this ability. Other children in fifth and ninth grades, and in classes for the mildly mentally handicapped, have…

The eye movements of two college graduates were monitored in a study of flexible reading, which is defined as the ability to adjust one's rate and approach to reading according to the purpose of reading, the difficulty of the material, and one's knowledge of the subject matter. The subjects were told to read an excerpt from a tenth grade biology…