Compressed speech (speed listening), in which audiotapes are speeded up, is examined in this paper along with its relationship to the reading process. Among the topics discussed first are the close relationship between reading and listening, the rationale behind compressed speech, and the use of compressed speech in business communication, special…

This paper reports on the learning of difficult and complex concepts, the characteristics of these concepts that make them difficult for students to learn and understand well, the kinds of misconceptions students acquire, and the difficulty of changing these mistaken beliefs. A scheme, the Conceptual Stability Scheme, is presented for analyzing a…

The metacognitive aspects of reading include knowledge about and regulation of the mental processes involved. The knowledge component includes self-knowledge, which is awareness of personal strengths and weaknesses, and task-knowledge, which is awareness of the characteristics of the task and appropriate strategies for dealing with them. The…

The ability of 20 deaf and 20 hearing high school students to recall propositions and inferences from prose was examined and compared. Ss were asked to read and then write a given story. Hearing Ss recalled significantly larger numbers of propositions than deaf students, but both deaf and hearing Ss recalled similar numbers of story inferences in…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that readers make inferences if those inferences are necessary for the reconstruction of the writer's model. Each experiment involved the same 42 subjects who read a series of short passages. The first experiment examined inferences pertaining either to the underlying global situation of a…

The purpose of this study was to describe the strategies mothers employ to elicit clarifying information from their children in a situation in which the children were reporting a past event. Forty 2-year-old children individually participated in a mock birthday party with the experimenter. Immediately afterwards, the mothers (20 of whom had…

The influence of situational expectations, conditioned by previous experience, on the interpretation of entire prose passages was investigated with 22 hearing and 18 hearing impaired adolescents. The ambiguous paragraph model was borrowed from D. Schallert and two separate paragraphs were constructed. Ten multiple choice questions were generated…

The aim of the study (Johnsen Hoines 2002) reported here was to shed light on the process through which student teachers express and interpret their understandings about mathematical notions and thereby gain insight into them. This paper focuses on how students cooperate and move between different ways of understandings. It emphases in particular…

This study examined the effectiveness of self-regulated learning (SRL) training in facilitating students' learning with hyerpermedia as indicated by both performance and process data. Undergraduate students (n=131) were randomly assigned to either a training condition on how to regulate their learning (n=63) or a no training condition (n=68) and…

This paper provides a rationale for using and sustaining rival hypotheses Web-based tools to promote students' understanding of the concepts of internal and external validity. Five major concerns are identified. The first is that, in their present form, the Web sites subsume the discussion of threats to validity under experimental designs, giving…

The purpose of this investigation was to determine how well Down Syndrome (DS) adolescents and young adults, relative to other mentally handicapped (MH) individuals, comprehend single words and simple sentences. Samples of 26 DS and 26 MH individuals were matched on intelligence and chronological age and were administered audiological, language,…

Recent literature on individual differences in verbal ability indicates that people demonstrating high verbal comprehension are quicker and more accurate in identifying lexical items, as well as more rapid in parsing sentences. They are not, however, more sensitive to the general gist of a passage, and thus do not respond to priming from context…

This study examined the effects of children's cognitively based role expectations on their judgments of the grammatical acceptability of sentences. Sixty children, 12 each in grades 4 through 8, individually heard 10 sentences violating the Minimum Distance Principle (MDP). The sentences were grammatical, but linguistically complex, and violated…

Thirty-eight sixth grade students (20 good and 18 poor readers) were involved in a study that examined comprehension under oral and written modes of presentation and across four expository texts that had been prepared at two levels of difficulty (easy and hard). All subjects listened to and read the texts in a counterbalanced order and afterwards…

Communicative proficiency, defined as native-like ability to use the language as a medium of two-way communication, is most effectively and efficiently achieved through instruction emphasizing development of listening and reading comprehension skills, and virtually excluding training in production. The comprehension approach avoids the teaching of…