High school students are challenged to meet higher standards in order to ensure that they are prepared to face the literacy demands of our twenty-first century society (Beaufort, 2009; A. S. Erickson, Kleinhammer-Tramill, & Thurlow, 2007; Vernon, Baytops, McMahon, Padden, & Walther-Thomas, 2003). This study examined both above average high school…

This qualitative study examined the issue of history education and its failure to understand and implement the most effective teaching and learning strategies for the discipline. It did this by conducting interviews, observations, and a focus group with a group of history teachers in a suburban high school in New England. While aiming to explain…

Despite the influence of changing demographics in Japan, the National Center Test for University Entrance Exams continues to assert an ever increasing role in the process of university admissions. In preparation for this examination, the majority of senior high school students learn from textbooks approved by the Japanese Ministry of Education,…

The unitary competence theory claims the existence of a general language proficiency that makes the global evaluation of language skills possible and accounts for the high correlations between language tests of whatever form and modality. This study aims to test the theory by investigating the correlation between reading and listening…

The results show that the delay-retention effect occurs under conditions approximating those of real instruction and confirm the interference-perseveration interpretation of the phenomenon. (Author)

Asks the question, Can the learning cycle also be applied effectively to science text? High school students (n=23) were tested for reasoning ability then randomly assigned to read either a learning-cycle or traditional-text passage. Students who read the learning-cycle passage earned higher scores on concept comprehension questions at all…

The effects of strategy instruction (reciprocal teaching methods) on reading comprehension were studied by comparing 53 high school students receiving strategy instruction with 22 who did not. Results indicate that strategy instruction is superior to traditional methods in fostering reading comprehension as measured by experimenter designed tests.…

This study investigated the use readers make of visual and verbal illustration to understand and remember what they have read. Specific focus was placed on readers' use of pictures and analogies to understand and remember written directions for a spatial manipulation task. The independent variables measured were type of text, mode of illustration,…

A study sought to acquire new insights into cross-linguistic processing strategies of native English (NE) readers and native Spanish (NS) readers after they read informational texts organized according to preferred writing styles in Spanish. Previous studies suggest that: NS readers will be more efficient processors of embeddedness than NE…

A study investigated whether there is a significant difference between the reading comprehension levels of eleventh grade students at a Catholic school in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, who incorporate free writing exercises into their literature class, and those who do not. Pre- and posttest mean reading comprehension scores were derived through the…

A study investigated the ability of above average and average high school students to use text structure to identify main ideas and write a summary. Schema possession of 388 sophomores was assessed by measuring their ability to organize the components of a scrambled passage. Only 10 students in the above average and 20 in the average ability…

Compared to 12 normally achieving students, 12 language-impaired high school students had significantly poorer comprehension of humor elements of riddles, jokes, and puns classified according to their phonological, morphological, or syntactic elements. Especially poor were subjects' ability to grasp the nature of multimeaning words and to segment…

Compares the effectiveness of a traditional vocabulary instruction unit with an alternative unit which applied the concepts of procedural and conditional knowledge to secondary students' word learning. Discusses key characteristics that made the alternative unit successful. (SR)

Differences in the comprehension and interpretation of historical texts are discussed for eight high school students and eight historians. The sources of differences in the two groups and their epistemological stances are analyzed. Implications for reading comprehension and the place of history in the school curriculum are discussed. (SLD)

A study hypothesized that auditory input does not increase the comprehension of students. Forty Basic Skills English students in a suburban high school were identified for this study. They were grouped according to class section and assigned randomly to treatments. Two of the sections read narrative and persuasive/argument texts silently and were…