A study investigated the effects of goal setting on children's self-efficacy and skillful performance during reading comprehension instruction. Subjects, 17 fourth graders and 16 fifth graders from one elementary school, had regularly received remedial reading comprehension instruction. Subjects were administered a pretest consisting of a…

A study investigated the relation of text structure to information retained by readers. The premise investigated was that memory for the central facts of a passage will be enhanced by the presence of related information as theorized in the encoding elaboration model (developed by Anderson and Reder in 1979). This model states that comprehension…

A study investigated the effectiveness of teaching children how to take reading comprehension tests. Twenty-eight fifth grade students were pretested using the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, Survey D, Form I. The students were tested on speed and accuracy, vocabulary, and comprehension. Students were given 30 minutes of daily instruction and…

A study examined the effects of training in a self-generated learning strategy on students' ability to comprehend text and self-monitor their understanding while engaging in strategic text processing. The study also explored the extent to which grade level and passage difficulty interacted with training to produce treatment effects. Subjects, 36…

A study investigated the effects of sentence combining instruction on the reading comprehension and writing maturity of fifth grade children. The sample consisted of an experimental and a control group with 25 children in each group. For 6 weeks the experimental group received instruction in sentence combining, defined for purposes of the study as…

Twenty-four sixth grade students participated in a study that adapted earlier reading research to determine whether students would demonstrate sensitivity to the presence or absence of a relevant schema in a passage and whether skilled readers would show more use of the schema than would less skilled readers. Six skilled and six less skilled…

Prepared as part of a continuing study of the instructional practices that make up the process of schooling, this paper concentrates on the practices that comprise reading comprehension instruction. The paper focuses on four skills commonly taught and assessed as part of many widely used reading comprehension instruction programs in the…

Three commonly used informal reading inventories were examined to determine the extent to which their comprehension test questions were passage independent, and could be answered correctly without reading the passages on which they were based. Fourth graders were given the questions orally without access to the passages. The percentage of…

A study was conducted to determine: (1) the relationships between prior knowledge and passage recall; (2) the effect of a prereading activity (PReP) on available knowledge; and (3) the effect of the PReP activity on total comprehension scores. The subjects were 161 sixth grade students from a middle class suburban Long Island, New York, public…

Psycholinguistic knowledge and techniques can be used as the basis for reading process research with a view to the development of a reading theory. The initial phase of such a study is reported, and reading behavior on a comprehensive basis is examined. The assumption upon which the research is based is that reading miscues are generated by the…

A study was conducted to determine the effect of a program of listening skills on the reading comprehension of fourth grade students. After a pretest, an experimental group of 12 boys and 12 girls was selected randomly from four classrooms and a control group was selected with matched pretest scores. The experimental group was taught using…

In this study, the effect of a passage organizer (topic sentence) on the ability to identify main ideas was tested. The second purpose of this study was to determine whether main idea comprehension is affected by the type of main idea question asked. Thirty third- and thirty fourth-grade children selected on a random basis from a semi-rural…

Designed to measure specific dimensions of reading comprehension, the items for this test are based on a comprehension model which suggests that comprehension can be defined as six different skill areas: vocabulary, syntax, item recall, item sequence, interpretation, and evaluation. The test is divided into sections to correspond to each of the…

Samples of 98 fourth graders and 111 sixth graders participated in a study of the relationships between operational thinking and reading comprehension of texts involving operational structures. Tests of operational thinking, reading comprehension, IQ, and vocabulary were administered in class groups. Results from correlational and factor analyses…

Thirty-eight sixth-grade students participated in a study that examined the relationship of conceptual tempo and performance on several study and reading activities. Results indicate that conceptual tempo may have a relationship to effective studying and reading. Methodology and results are discussed. (Author/JL)