Reports on a study that investigated ninth-grade students' use of a reading strategy that focused on following the organizational structure of text to determine what is important to remember. Texts were organized with problem/solution or comparison structures and the structure strategy appeared to be effective for retrieval. (MKM)

Identifies critical variables that underlie young adults' performance on document literacy tasks from the National Assessment of Educational Progress's Young Adult Literacy study. Argues that the variables identified and document grammar developed could help improve the usability of documents, assist readers in understanding documents, and develop…

Reviews prominent reading theories in light of their accounts of how automatic and control processes combine to produce successful text comprehension, and the trade-offs between the two. Presents the Compensatory-Encoding Model of reading, which explicates how, when, and why automatic and control processes interact. Notes important educational…

School age children and adults read short paragraphs suggesting spatial relationships and were given a recognition test containing items congruent with the semantic content of the test. Subjects recognized the semantically congruent inferences as having been present in the original reading material. (AA)

Investigates whether college readers are aware of their performance following multiple-choice comprehension tests. Certainty ratings were more consistent with students' actual performance for opposites and analogies than for comprehension test items. (SR)

Reports on a longitudinal study which found that letter-naming speed was strongly associated with subsequent progress in reading for kindergarten children but not for second grade children. Suggests that code emphasis should not be overlooked in beginning reading. (ARH)

Defines comprehension monitoring as a metacognitive process that is affected by person, strategy, and task variables. Reviews research in the area and draws conclusions based on that research. (FL)

Points up the importance of encoding time to the global act of reading. (AEA)

Reports that the substitution of a cloze instructional center for various reading centers improved students' reading comprehension and divergent production. (AEA)

A study of the effects of clause order and explicitness on comprehension of reversible causal relationships revealed that, for fifth graders, explicit-condition groups had a higher level of comprehension of causal relationships than did implicit-condition groups. For college students, both explicitness and clause order were significant factors in…

Examines the tongue-twister effect to help determine the role of phonological information during silent reading. Concludes that the tongue-twister effect results from phonetic rather than visual confusion, and that the locus of the effect is within working memory. (MG)

Examines the influence of prior knowledge on expert readers' strategies to identify and state a text's main idea. Identifies three methods of constructing the main idea: automatic construction; draft-and-revision; and topic/comment. Concludes that expert readers' construction of the main idea is often a mediated, strategic task. (RS)

Investigates text cues and comprehension strategies used by competent readers comprehending lengthy written arguments. Finds that both text structure and signaling in introductions and conclusions consistently influenced the 12th-grade advanced placement English students' responses. Notes that these cues helped students recognize the argument…

Tests undergraduate students on efficiencies of lexical access, semantic memory access, verbal working memory span, contextual priming, and efficiency with which anaphors are resolved. Finds that none of the reading subcomponent measures correlated with comprehension when subjects were not under a time pressure, but a number of these measures…

Finds that orthographic information dominated word recognition of both good and poor readers and that both semantic contexts and text difficulty influenced the reading of target words. Shows that good readers used orthographic information more than did poor readers, whereas poor readers used semantic context more than good readers. Finds support…