The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of a program that offered sustained strategic reading instruction on reading abilities of third and fourth graders. The study was conducted among 1,469 children from 40 schools in the Netherlands. Schools were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group. Multilevel…

A study investigated the effect of training Dutch students to learn to derive word meanings from written context. Subjects, 64 grade 6 primary school children, were randomly divided into control and experimental groups. The experimental group followed eight lessons in their mothertongue (Dutch), while the control group followed their regular…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

Whether text comprehension strategies could be taught to children with poor decoding and reading skills was studied with 428 fourth graders (poor readers) and 167 students from schools for the learning disabled. Clear benefits of training were apparent at posttesting, but maintenance test performance did not show prolonged benefits, suggesting a…