Focusing on improving college students' reading efficiency, a study investigated whether a commercially-prepared computerized speed reading package, Speed Reader II, could be utilized as effectively as traditionally printed text. Subjects were 70 college freshmen from a college reading and rate improvement course with borderline scores on the…

Two experiments examined the cognitive resources used by readers in sentence modeling (summarizing the propositions in a sentence) as a function of reader task and of sentence complexity. It was predicted that encoding a sentence into memory for later recall would require more cognitive resources than reading a text to answer immediate questions,…

Research on children's oral reading errors provides evidence that both top down and bottom up processes interactively contribute to reading. Syntactic and semantic expectations are sources of information for top down processing, while knowledge of letter-sound relations provides information for bottom up processing. As children learn to read,…

Four text passages varying along the dimensions of the number of propositions unifying one or more text paragraphs and text length were constructed. The text content pertained to nine concepts in the area of operant conditioning psychology. Fifty-eight university students were pretested and then blocked on prior text-related knowledge, and read…

The effects of two components of formative evaluation, frequency of measurement and use of data, were compared. Fifty-two learning disabled and educable mentally retarded students in grades 2-6, enrolled in regular class programs and receiving reading instruction in a special education resource room, were randomly assigned to either (1) a…

The basic reading skills learned in the primary grades do not equip students with sufficient skills to read everything they need to read through school. Hence all teachers, regardless of the grade level or subject they teach, should know what the fundamental reading skills are and how to teach them to children who need help with increasingly more…

Discussion of the use of desktop publishing software to produce instructional materials highlights a study that used a wrap-around text format with variations in the amount of white space surrounding the graphic to investigate the effect of white space variations on the reading speed and comprehension of undergraduate students. (28 references)…

A thirty-hour skills-based reading program was designed for beginning-level ESL (English as a second language) students in the intensive English language program at Boston University. Reading was included as an essential component in the low-level college-preparatory ESL class for several reasons: (1) reading instruction and practice begin to…