Psychometric and ethnographic frameworks were used to explore the relationships among adults' uses for reading and their demonstrated competencies with related domains of tasks. Information regarding frequently occurring reading tasks was gathered from 42 adults in both work and leisure settings by means of questionnaires, interviews, and…

Three studies were conducted to test the effectiveness of reciprocal teaching as a means of instructing seventh grade poor readers about activities they could use to increase comprehension and to ascertain that their comprehension was proceeding smoothly (comprehension monitoring). Reciprocal teaching involves having teacher and students take…

While listening comprehension is perhaps the most ignored area of the language arts, a review of the literature suggests that it is deserving of more classroom instructional time. Involving the simultaneous orchestration of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics, and knowledge of text structure, listening comprehension seems to be controlled by…

A study was conducted to examine learning from textbook sentences that provide examples. It was predicted that an example written succinctly and with a word order that emphasized its parallel semantic relations with the exemplified principle, such as "animals have parasites; dogs have fleas," would have a positive effect on idea comprehension. It…

Using an effort toward comprehension paradigm developed by P. M. Auble, J. J. Franks, and S. A. Soraci, Jr. (1979), the worry component of state test anxiety was related to long-term memory for sentence encoding conditions that involved comprehension, but low effort (embedded-cue) and comprehension-high effort (post-cue). A noncomprehension…

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 1,150 reports of reading research identified between July 1, 1983, and June 30, 1984. The summaries are arranged into six…

Self talk (thoughts about one's self and own performance while learning or working) can affect cognitive and learning strategies that in turn affect specific learning techniques. Negative self talk can interfere with learning since it reinforces feelings of failure, thereby increasing the probability of continued failure, and maintains an…

Recent brain research demonstrates that the left hemisphere of the brain processes information in a linear, organized way. The right hemisphere processes the same information as a whole, with a focus on nonverbal, spatial components. Current educational practice is inordinately skewed to develop only the left hemisphere of the brain. Data from…

A study investigated children's recall and representation for multiple episode stories differing in terms of goal structure. Subjects were 36 third and fifth grade students reading below grade level, and 48 students from the same grades who were identified as average readers. The students read or listened to stories containing embedded and…

It is suggested that a reader's idea structure will affect processing of incoming information. Two aspects of the idea structure are further developed--the truth value aspect and the analytic level aspect. The idea structure can be characterized by ideas consisting of propositions which are considered to be more or less true or false (beliefs), or…

The theme of this report is that recent theory and research related to the cognitive domain of children's comprehension of stories have implications for the social domain of children's understanding of interpersonal interaction, since there are important overlaps between the abilities necessary to comprehend stories about social events and those…

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…

Metacognition refers to an individual's knowledge concerning his/her own cognitive processes. Children's metacognitive strategies were examined in a study predicated upon R.J. Spiro's hypothesis that subjects tend to reproduce (literally recall) text information in formal situations and to reconstruct (inferentially recall) it in informal…

The purpose of this study was to measure the influence of prior knowledge on reading comprehension. Twenty second-graders who were reading at, or not more than one year above, grade level were pretested to determine the extent of their prior knowledge about the topic they would be reading. Based on their pretest scores, the students were divided…

This research explored the fundamental processes involved in comprehending linguistic material: the duration of the process, the sequence of processes, and the sources of errors. One project examined the comprehension of affirmative and negative sentences that are read and verified with respect to a picture. A model developed to account for the…