In an effort to create a multilevel, interactive, and hypothesis-based model of the reading comprehension process that bridges interdisciplinary gaps in the theory of learning, this report focuses on descriptions of cognitive processes developed in the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, sociolinguistics, linguistics, and…

Intended to help professionals remain knowledgeable about current research in reading and to serve as a relatively accessible bibliographic source of research on a specific topic, this annual report summarizes approximately 800 reading research reports identified between July 1, 1985, and June 30, 1986. The summaries are arranged into six major…

A study explored whether teaching the comprehension skills of inference, drawing conclusions, sequencing, and cause and effect would increase student achievement in reading and language while at the same time imparting social science content. Subjects, 197 eighth grade students in the experimental group and 192 eighth grade students in the control…

A study examined the impact of instruction on the metacognitive strategies of five fifth-grade students whose vocabulary knowledge test scores were two or more stanines higher than their comprehension test scores. The students were administered "The Informal Reading Inventory" to determine their appropriate functional levels and the…

Two studies of integrated language instruction for students of English as a second language (ESL) are reported. The first had two objectives: to (1) investigate the effects of writing activities on the comprehension and retention of content area reading and (2) examine the relationship between the students' ability to select the main idea and…

Reading comprehension can be more effectively taught using new instructional frameworks--such as explicit comprehension instruction--rather than the basal reading model. Traditionally, comprehension has been taught through a process of mentioning the skill that students should apply, practicing the skill in workbooks, and assessing student…

To compare both the effect of and the student attitude toward instruction in outlining and graphic organization, 72 grade 10 world history students were divided into three treatment groups. Two groups, one of which had previously received 14 weeks of summarization training, were instructed in a three-step procedure for creating a graphic organizer…

Three sets of experiments compared skilled and unskilled college and school age (sixth through eighth grade) readers' processing of spoken and printed sentences in isolation and in story context. The two types of readers differed in their processing of the structural, thematic, and schematic properties of sentences in both reading and listening.…

A series of experiments were conducted to determine what information readers use when they read to understand a story. The experiments examined both skilled adult readers and children beginning to read. Oral reading was used both because elementary school teachers frequently ask children to read aloud and because oral reading provides an…

The "levels effect," the finding that the more central to the meaning of a passage an idea is the more likely that idea is to be retained, does not seem to hold for immediate recognition. Therefore, a study was conducted to test a model of information storage that predicted that when surface structure information was preserved in its…

A study was conducted to verify the findings of previous research showing that a difference in recall of superordinate and subordinate level concepts existed among various reading ability groups within the same grade of elementary school children. Instead of especially constructed passages used in the previous studies, the study used actual…

Psychological procedures change behavior in part by creating and strengthening perceived self-efficacy, which refers to personal judgments of performance capabilities in a given activity. In addition, it has been hypothesized that attributions, or perceived causes of outcomes, exert important effects on self-efficacy. A study investigated how the…

A study examined the ability of subjects of varying ages to write summaries of very familiar material. In particular, it explored the subjects' planning activities both prior to and during the summarization task. The subjects, 15 fifth, 16 seventh, and 15 eleventh grade students and 11 college students, were given two stories to study for a week.…

Psychological research has identified a number of cognitive processes and language abilities that are involved in the development of reading skills. This paper examines the ways in which research findings relate to current curriculum practices in such areas as learning letters and sounds; developing auditory perception skills; word recognition;…

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…