The purpose of this study was to investigate the interrelationship between passage organization and the presence or absence of advance organizers. Two sets of stimulus materials were used. One set consisted of six paragraphs, each of which described the important events in the administration of one obscure American president. The second set of…

Providing specific instructions on reading material to be retained or to be forgotten induced college students to study all the material at a slower pace. A second experiment indicated that increased reading time was necessary for retention of the emphasized sentences. (Author/GDC)

Study goals may be less effective when the sequence of the list of goals does not match the sequence of goal-relevant information in a reading passage. In a study using undergraduates, learning of goal-relevant information was lower when the study goals and text sequences did not match. (Author/GDC)

Two instructional strategies to help mildly learning handicapped students read and understand textual material are described: (1) previewing (use of introductory paragraphs, including questions, that provide a cognitive framework for approaching a textbook passage); and (2) text summarization by students themselves as a follow-up activity.…

Advanced organizers produced two distinct effects--subsumption of related material and abstraction of incidental concepts. (RB)

The effectiveness of having 51 students generate their own headings for scientific text is assessed. Results reveal that generating headings enhances performance on a number of recall measures compared to either author-provided headings or no headings. (Author)

Reports on a study to determine whether questions asked prior to reading or questions asked before and after reading would improve elementary school students' word recognition and reading comprehension performance. Concludes that no significant differences existed in favor of the prequestion task on word recognition or comprehension performance.…

The study found that instructing 13 learning-disabled junior high students in the necessary prior knowledge (information and vocabulary concepts) led to superior reading comprehension performance. Textually explicit text structure also improved reading comprehension. (DB)

Explores ways people learn from text. Content overlap between a text and the reader's prior knowledge is identified as one factor. Methods are proposed to identify whether a text is suitable for readers with a specific background. The usefulness of coherence gaps that stimulate constructive activities is discussed. (SLD)

A study focusing on anxiety and its interaction with reading explored the undetermined potential of prequestions for treating high reading-related anxiety. The research sample was comprised of 151 members of the freshman nursing classes at a large southeastern university. Evaluation materials included commercial reading tests as well as questions…

Using the generative model of learning, this study investigates the effects of reader constructed text headings on readers' text recall and comprehension. One hundred pupils, ages 12-14, from the Blythe Bridge Comprehensive School, Staffordshire, England, were assigned to one of two treatment groups using a 1000-word passage. The experimental…

A study was conducted to determine whether explicit instructions could be as effective as paraphrased adjunct questions in enhancing subjects' reading comprehension. Eighty-six United States Navy enlisted men were assigned to one of four groups and given a lengthy passage from the "Naval Orientation Manual" to read. Following the…

This monograph is the second in a series of semiannual reports that focus on research related to reading in secondary schools. The first section contains two literature reviews dealing with study habits and study skills related to reading. The second section offers two reviews related to prereading anticipation activities, including the advance…

To test the effects of prequestions and postquestions on word recognition and comprehension, two studies were conducted involving two groups of first through fifth grade students. An informal reading inventory using passages from Harper and Row's "Basic Reading Program" was administered and the results on the lowest instructional and frustrational…

A study investigated the effect of relevant background knowledge on the reading comprehension of students of Spanish. Students with limited knowledge of baseball took a comprehension test on a Spanish-language report of a baseball game. Results indicate that background knowledge is possibly more important than language level for comprehension.…