The purpose of this article is to explain each of the three phases of reading textbooks and to provide strategies for aiding students to better understand and connect to their textbooks in each of these phases. Each of the three phases is named for its writing counterpart: planning, drafting, and evaluating. This article also states that three…

Studies investigating the impact of parent involvement programs on children's reading ability and children's self concept usually fail to use rigorous research methods. This study utilizes a pre-test/post-test experimental design to investigate the effects of a 12 week parent and child reading intervention on the reading ability and self…

Personalization of word problems in mathematics has been used to increase student motivation and comprehension. Similar techniques may be effective in other disciplines. In the present study computer techniques allowed integration into stories of personalized referents from an inventory of student interests. Stories were produced at three levels…

While it is widely recognized that comprehension monitoring is an important reading comprehension ability, effective methods for teaching readers to recognize and overcome various comprehension obstacles have not yet been conclusively identified. To determine if microcomputers could be used to teach students to overcome such obstacles, 41 fourth…

Numerous comprehension strategies can be used successfully with both children's literature and a basal reading series to help children focus on written text during reading. One of the most important techniques is developing background knowledge prior to reading--the overall purpose of which is to help readers relate their existing schemata to the…

For almost half a century the United States military services have incorporated formal literacy programs into job training for those enlistees who are less than fully qualified. Over the years, several successful job-specific reading programs have evolved. In 1975, the Army began the Functional Literacy (FLIT) Program, a program based on a…

This paper addresses cognitive issues raised by the success of an early reading intervention program, Reading Recovery (originated in New Zealand and also used in Australia and the United States,) in which the great majority of students move from low reading achievement to average achievement for their age group within 12-15 weeks. The first…

A study on children's recall of words presented on a computer was assessed as a function of action and verbal labels. Subjects, 80 public school children in a southeastern city, equally distributed between kindergarten and second grade and between high and low reading ability levels, interacted with different versions of a computer presentation.…

Research has consistently shown that vocabulary knowledge, including both word recognition skills and understanding of word meaning, is highly predictive of achievement in other aspects of reading--oral and silent reading and comprehension. The importance of instruction in word recognition and decoding has been recently demonstrated by the rise in…

The movement away from a stimulus-response to a constructive view of memory and reading comprehension has had an impact on both reading research and teaching. Viewing memory as not simply the recollection of sensory data, but as the complex interaction of the sensory experience with its immediate context and the perceiver's previous knowledge,…

Good readers tend to engage in conscious reading strategies that poor readers do not. Expert readers display the following strategic behaviors that novices do not: (1) studying text segments previously found difficult more extensively than easy segments; (2) spending more study time on difficult stories than on easy ones; (3) summarizing just the…

Noting that the Neurological Impress Method (NIM) of reading instruction has been shown to be an effective intervention strategy for use with remedial readers, this paper examines the theoretical and empirical validity of NIM techniques. The discussion focuses on (1) a procedural description of the technique, which involves having student and…

To determine the relative transfer value of imposed and induced visual images in relation to level of textual materials' illustration-dependence, 108 seventh grade students read textbook excerpts written at four levels of illustration dependence under four visual imagery conditions. The four levels of illustration dependence were high, moderate,…

Noting that good reading comprehension is aided by the reader's attention to text organization, this paper presents a rationale and method for teaching students to map content materials. The paper begins by noting research demonstrating that good comprehenders attend to text organization. It then briefly reviews research related to the impact on…

The model for the reading and study skills center at the University of Montana is based on the individualized and classroom techniques that have been successful with university students. The center offers two courses: increasing reading effectiveness and improving reading and study skills. The first is designed to improve reading achievement,…