Studies in cognitive science have verified that working memory (where the brain solves problems) can manipulate nearly all elements of knowledge that can be recalled automatically from long-term memory, but only a few elements that have not previously been well memorized. Research in reading comprehension has found that "lecture notes with…

This research sought to add to a body of knowledge that is severely underrepresented in the scientific literature, reading comprehension in secondary students. Chapter 1 examines the current state of literacy in the nation's public schools and the consequences that arise if students leave high school with inadequate reading skills. It discusses…

The author reported results of 2 sequential and interrelated studies that examined the efficacy of combining 2 models of reading strategy instruction -- reciprocal teaching and direct explanation. The studies were implemented in a high school in the Midwest. The literature documents that even mainstream high school students have serious deficits…

Eleven tests of reading comprehension, language skills, and cognitive processes were administered to 20 high school readers with learning disabilities and 20 controls. The variance on nonverbal tests was greater for the group with LD than for the controls; some individuals with learning disabilities performed as well as the controls. (Author/DB)

Thirty-nine high school students with mild disabilities and poor reading comprehension were trained to use either student-generated or expert-generated cognitive organizers to improve literal and inferential reading comprehension. Following training, both groups exceeded the reading comprehension performance of a control group, and students using…

Students (N=22) enrolled in secondary school biology were evaluated for their abilities to use: combinatorial logic; correlational reasoning; separation and control of variables; exclusion of irrelevant variables; proportional reasoning; and probabilistic reasoning. Each student responded individually to six Piagetian tasks designed to measure…

Several experimental studies are reviewed, the results of which suggest that students often fail to acquire an understanding of some of the concepts, relationships, principles, and processes that are fundamental to traditional high school course material. Questions of what it means to understand something and of how to assess understanding are…

This study investigated how students processed information obtained by reading a passage related to inertial reference frames. Two groups of 10th-grade students (one group consisting of students identified as potential National Merit Scholars and another consisting of students enrolled in level-I biology) read a science text passage and answered a…

Working on the hypothesis that if readers had several alternative correct meanings of a given text set before them they would select the one in accordance with their abstract abilities and intellectual maturity, a study investigated the measurement of levels of meaning as illustrated in taxonomies and focused on the applicability of the taxonomies…

Four levels of notetaking (summary, paraphrase, verbatim, and letter search) were used to control depth of processing of a prose passage with high school students, who then either reviewed their notes or read an interpolated text. Results favored groups with deeper levels of processing on two post-tests. (Author/RD)

The study of differences between 12 subjects with learning disabilities and 12 without, across 3 grade levels (intermediate, junior high, and senior high) and 2 story grammar tasks, found no developmental differences between disabled and nondisabled groups but did find significant differences in the amount and type of information recalled. (DB)

A study was conducted to investigate the compensatory effects of graphic organizers on text organization. Subjects were 114 tenth grade students who read two versions of an expository passage containing identical information but differing in top level structure. The version organized to show opposing views (comparison/contrast) was considered…

Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, and…

In three experiments subjects (college and high school students) read passages which described psychological principles and answered either adjunct application or factual questions while reading. Questions were presented either before, after, or both before and after the parts of the passage that answered the questions. Subsequently subjects took…

Describes pilot study in a high school which assessed the qualitative and quantitative changes which occurred in two severely disabled readers' cognitive processes during strategy training. Results suggested that a qualitative shift in verbal strategy reports occurred during prose recall. Introduction of cognitive training increased recall of…