Elementary school children's understanding was assessed after they read or listened to brief texts that described a scene, explained a sequence of events, or told a story. Results indicated that effectiveness in understanding depends on the fluency with which component processes of perceptual recognition, comprehension, and memory are coordinated.…

The relationship of reading performance to difficulty level of material was the focus of this study. Participants in the study were 83 fourth graders from four urban schools. Each student was administered passages at different levels of challenge (independent, instructional, frustration) based on word identification accuracy. Passages were scored…

During oral and silent reading, retention was related to segment length and existence of sentence boundary. Next limits on retention were tested by increasing segment length and difficulty. Performance of less skilled readers was uniformly low; performance of skilled and older readers was again affected by length and sentence boundary. (Author/CP)

This study was conducted to determine the relationship between listening comprehension and rate of presentation using meaningful prose materials. A total of 103 students from a suburban sixth-grade class in a central New Jersey school district participated in the study. To determine reading comprehension levels, the students were administered the…

Conventional wisdom has suggested that the rate at which a reader processes text matters little as long as the reader can read with accuracy and comprehension. This paper makes the case that reading rate is an essential component of proficient reading, and is significantly correlated with other measures of proficient reading, such as standardized…

Verbal coding and listening comprehension ability differed among skilled and less skilled readers in second, third, and fifth grades. As verbal coding speed increased, comprehension skill became the more important predictor of reading skill. Apparently, verbal coding processes, which are slow, inhibit other reading processes. (Author/CP)

This document reports the findings of a study of children's comprehension of stories containing inconsistent information. The subjects were 84 children in kindergarten and the second, fourth and sixth grades. Twelve subjects from each grade listened to two stories and twelve other subjects from grades 2, 4, and 6 read two stories. Each subject was…

Two young autistic children exhibited normal reading comprehension but reading speeds considerably faster than controls. The effect of randomizing word order was minimal for the older of the two autistic boys. Results indicate that efficient grapheme-phoneme conversion is primarily responsible for the fast reading of the autistic children.…

A study involving 238 fourth grade pupils was conducted to determine whether a relationship exists between the use of instruction with masked materials and pupils' word recognition and comprehension. The pupils were placed into either an experimental or a control group. Each group was administered a pretest to measure reading rate, to insure that…

Discusses methods and research related to increasing children's reading rates to improve their comprehension and self-esteem. Concludes that the improvement of reading rate should be an established component of any reading program. (MG)

Preliminary findings are consistent with the view that less experienced readers transform graphic to aural input before deriving a semantic interpretation. (RB)

THE TEST WAS DESIGNED TO ASSESS SPEED OF READING COMPREHENSION. IT CONSISTED OF NUMBERED PASSAGES, ONE TO THREE SENTENCES IN LENGTH, ARRANGED IN PARAGRAPH FORM TO SIMULATE THE NORMAL READING EXERCISE. TOWARD THE END OF EACH PASSAGE, A WORD WAS INSERTED WHICH SPOILED THE MEANING OF THE PASSAGE. THE PUPILS WERE INSTRUCTED TO FIND THE WORD THAT…

This investigation compared the reading comprehension of 60 fourth-grade students in an open space school during periods of quiet and periods of naturally occurring background noise. Noise had no significant effect on accuracy or reading speed. (JMF)

Reviews 11 studies originally analyzed by Bergquist to support the contention that children can be trained to increase their reading rates without any loss of comprehension along with more recent work. Concludes that rapid reading results in a decrease in the accuracy of comprehension. (FL)