This study examined whether post-reading comprehension would be affected by the inclusion of pictorial material with a story and a prereading prediction questionnaire. Subjects, 75 heterogeneously grouped fourth grade students randomly assigned to one of three groups, either (1) read a basal reader passage with pictorial material; or (2) read the…

To identify children who use a perseverative text processing strategy and to examine the effects of this strategy on recall and comprehenson, 255 fifth and sixth graders were screened for large differences between regressed standard scores for inductively (main idea last) and deductively (main idea first) structured paragraphs. Sixteen Ss were…

The combined use of rational sets of concept instances and of a concept definition is validated as a powerful controllable variable in instructional material that is designed to facilitate concept attainment. (Author)

The purpose of this study was to determine the strength of the relationship between syllabication ability and reading comprehension. Pre- and posttests using the syllabication and comprehension subtests of the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Tests were administered to 275 middle school children involved in corrective and developmental reading…

Discusses the accuracy of the Fog Index and the SMOG grade (two readability formulas) as predicators of readability. (MAI)

Learning disabled, average, and above average readers (Total N=45) in grades 5-7 were assessed on their metacognitive knowledge about vocabulary difficulty and passage organization in relation to ease of studying a passage. Findings indicated a consistency between the children's expressed metacognition and subsequent study behaviors. (Author/JW)

Examines the ability of children to evaluate their comprehension of text using lexical, external, and internal consistency standards. Finds that children more often use lexical and external consistency than internal consistency and that the results of verbal report measures are inconsistent with performance measures. (RS)

Examines the effect of self-instruction on error detection in short essays. Finds that above average readers in the self-instruction group performed significantly better than those in a control group, and that average readers displayed a similar but not statistically significant trend. (RS)

A study investigated the development of vocabulary knowledge in elementary school children as a function of story reading for partially known and unknown words. Subjects, 43 fourth-grade low-middle to middle-class children from a rural elementary school in the southeastern United States, participated in a vocabulary checklist in which they…

In order to investigate differences between the comprehension of high or low imagery passages of long or short length, a study analyzed the reading comprehension of fifth grade pupils (all reading at grade level). Thirty subjects read 16 passages each: four high imagery/short; four high imagery/long; four low imagery/short; and four low…

An instructional study was conducted (1) to explore the efficacy of using an explicit instruction model versus a basal approach to teach the comprehension or critical reading skills of discerning fact and opinion and evaluating evidence, and (2) to learn whether adding a functional aspect to the instruction would affect the students' acquisition…

As part of the activities at the Research Institute in Education of Learning Disabled Children, work was carried out with a group of about 30 children (grades 4 through 6) disabled in the comprehension of written language. Most of these children, when reading, went beyond using prior knowledge to provide schemata and interpretations; they…

IN A STUDY TO DETERMINE THE EFFECT OF ATTITUDES ON LEARNING, THE LITERAL AND INTERPRETATIVE COMPREHENSION ABILITIES OF INTERMEDIATE GRADE CHILDREN ON THEMATICALLY BASED READING SELECTIONS WERE COMPARED WITH THEIR ATTITUDES TOWARD THAT MATERIAL. THREE OF THE MOST COMMON READING THEMES INHERENT IN CHILDREN'S STORIES WERE DETERMINED BY A PANEL OF…

Presents a dialogue between a student and an examiner that demonstrates the difficulty of diagnosing a comprehension problem. (MKM)

This study describes the synthesis of the cloze technique with story-mapping techniques resulting in the Cloze Story Map (CSM) and tests the immediate and long-term usefulness of CSM with both expository and narrative texts. Results are discussed. (Author/MT)