The relationships between reading comprehension level, digit span, and short-term memory for Morse code-like temporal patterns were investigated. College students performed better when the first pattern was auditory. No relationship for college or fifth-grade students was found between digit span and accuracy in comparing patterns of tones.…

Presents results of a study of fifth-grade students' ability to interpret novel metaphors and similes when provided with a subschemata of semantic attributes. (AEA)

An examination was made of factors affecting reading performance of upper elementary students. Factors included effects of questions placed at various positions in the text, role of factual and inferential questions used as adjunct aids, and differences in processing strategies used by the readers in probed recall tasks. (Author/HOD)

This study consisted of two repeated measures experiments which explored the relationship between punctuation and grammatical expectations. (HOD)

Evaluation of the metacognitive strategies used by four upper elementary gifted students with reading disabilities during a reading comprehension think-aloud task found that, although the students monitored their reading and reported use of evaluation, paraphrase, and regulation metacognitive strategies, they were not proficient in these…

Examines two readers' images of literary characters as a basis for studying text meaning construction. Finds greater variation than commonality between the text and readers, as well as between the readers. Suggests using dialogue and rereadings in instruction to aid in developing and monitoring text understanding. (SR)

Investigates whether intermediate-grade readers' vocabulary learning and comprehension is affected by displaying texts on a computer screen that provides the meaning of difficult words. Concludes that the results support and help explain previous studies that found increases in comprehension when computer-mediated texts were used to expand or…

A model for understanding reading, containing three components (orthographic/phonological, morphological, and sentence and paragraph comprehension) was tested with 298 preadolescent readers. Maximum likelihood analyses showed that the model provides a good fit for the grade 4 data, a reasonable fit for grade 5, but was less unambiguous for grade…

Investigates effects of topic interest, writing ability, and summarization training on seventh-grade subjects' performance on multiple-choice tests and ability to summarize a social studies text. Finds that multiple-choice and summarization measures overlap little in the kinds of text comprehension they assess. (RS)

Describes a schema-awareness activity (used with sixth graders and college students) that provides teachers with a model of how students can use their past experiences and their ability to infer and predict when reading. Notes that the activity convinces students that they bring to the reading act much more than they encounter on the printed page.…

Learning-disabled and average readers (n=120) from grades four through six completed comprehension questions under one of four treatment conditions. Results indicated that computer-mediated text was no better than off-line conditions in improving learning-disabled readers' comprehension. Attribution and metacognitive sophistication were…

Investigates whether the vocabulary of written comprehension questions is an independent factor in determining students' reading comprehension performance. Finds that academic vocabulary in comprehension questions significantly decreased question-answering performance. Computes simple, multiple, and semipartial correlations between vocabulary…

Twenty grade 5 and 6 students with reading disabilities and 40 average readers were taught to use a self-questioning strategy for the identification of main ideas under either a standard instruction or a generalization induction condition. Results indicated the self-instructional training was equally effective under both conditions and performance…

Grade five students' (n=58) conceptual understanding of plate tectonics was measured by analysis of student-generated summaries and diagrams, and by posttest assessment of both the spatial/static and causal/dynamic aspects of the domain. The diagram group outperformed the summary and text-only groups on the posttest measures. Discusses the effects…

Examines school and classroom factors that moderated gender and home language gaps in reading achievement of New Zealand students. Uses data from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement survey to examine comprehension and word recognition scores of nine-year-olds. Shows that the magnitude of the gender gap and…