Offers a theoretical argument for the efficacy of a culturally based cognitive apprenticeship. Investigates the benefits of using ethnically diverse literature with ethnically diverse students, and how to make explicit in instruction some of the important comprehension strategies needed to interpret complex fiction independently. Notes that…

Concludes that a cloze strategy, which induced students to integrate text information with prior knowledge, yielded superior gains in comprehension compared to treatments that did not include the strategy. (FL)

Concludes that thematic organizers improved middle school students' performance on several measures of literal and inferential comprehension and facilitated more complete recall of text ideas and the ability to elaborate upon implied information. (FL)

Using eighth-grade subjects, a study examined the strategy differences between good and poor readers as they summarized what they had read. (HOD)

Describes an experiment that explored the relationships between text structure, prior knowledge, and reader's purpose on the processing of text and memory for text information. Results demonstrated that the strategies used to read text are flexible. (HOD)

Investigates young children's literacy activity within play settings designed to reflect authentic literacy contexts in children's real-world environment. Finds that, in the course of play activities, children demonstrated declarative knowledge about literacy (e.g. names of literacy objects), procedural knowledge, and strategic knowledge. Suggests…

Examines the task of locating information in textbook chapters (text search). Finds differences between more efficient and less efficient searchers in how they distribute their time across various aspects of the task. Discovers that as task complexity increases, efficient searchers allocate relatively more search time to initial stages of text…

Investigates the functions of reading across diverse cultural settings by examining children's purposes for reading in 13 countries and then identifying functions of reading common across age levels and nationalities. Finds three common factors identified by 10 and 13 year olds: utility, enjoyment, and escape. (KEH)

Examines how various reading and writing activities interacted over time as college students composed from multiple sources. Discusses the linear and nonlinear nature of the restructuring and composing process. Finds that individual reading and writing activities served unique yet partially overlapping functions over the course of the task.…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the nature of reading comprehension processes while reading on the Internet. Eleven sixth-grade students with the highest combination of standardized reading scores, reading report card grades, and Internet reading experiences were selected from a population of 150 sixth graders in three…

A study investigated the singular and combined effectiveness of phrasing and repeated readings (practice) on the recall of idea units and narrative categories of fifth grade good and poor readers, concluding that practice rather than phrasing proved to have the most facilitating effect on poor readers' recall of idea units but not narrative…

Examines the association of reading instruction with the amount and breadth of students' reading activities, taking account of social, cognitive, and home factors. Finds that, for students aged 9, 13, and 17, amount of reading was associated with levels of social interaction surrounding reading, cognitive strategies for reading, and…

Examines the effects of providing subjects with prior information about the organization of expository passages. Concludes that a structural organizer with outline grid and that notetaking alone both reliably and markedly facilitated comprehension and recall, and that a structural organizer without outline grid reliably facilitated comprehension…

Concludes that in virtually all tests involving phonemic processing, poor readers performed significantly worse than did chronological age controls. (FL)

Discusses the implications of research findings for the two-strategy model of context effects on word recognition. (AEA)