Sixteen teachers were surveyed to assess the acceptability of various reading comprehension strategies teachable during middle-to-late elementary school years. The teachers rated "prior knowledge activation" as most acceptable, followed by "representational imagery" and "question generation." Ratings should be a prominent consideration in deciding…

Finds (1) significant increase in reading rate and comprehension as the number of repeated reading increased; (2) students trained to segment sentences read faster and scored higher in comprehension than students given intonation training but not to a statistically significant degree; and (3) no interaction between repeated readings and…

Investigates development of vocabulary knowledge in fourth graders as a function of story reading for partially known and unknown words. Finds vocabulary growth was small but even for both partially known and unknown words; however, the characteristics of the words being learned themselves (particularly, part of speech and concreteness) were more…

Fifty-nine fifth-grade students were asked to use an unfamiliar textbook on a familiar topic to locate the answers to three questions, all of which contained terms that could be found in the book's index. As an analysis of covariance indicated, those who were asked guiding questions before and during their search were more successful in locating…

A study investigated whether the use of audio/visual aids had an effect upon comprehension recall. Thirty fourth-grade students from an urban public school were randomly divided into two equal samples of 15. One group was given a story to read (print only), while the other group viewed a filmstrip of the same story, thereby utilizing audio/visual…

A study compared text-connecting inferencing and text integration skills of hearing-impaired (HI) students who had surpassed the documented fourth-grade plateau in reading comprehension with those who had not. These groups were also compared to skilled and less-skilled normal-hearing (NH) fourth graders. Subjects read a four-page narrative and…

A study investigated whether fourth graders recall different amounts of information for passages of different emotional orientation, whether there is a relationship between their emotional response to the passage and the amount of information recalled, and whether they recall different relationships when they read passages of different emotional…

A study examined the effect on speed and comprehension performance of one silent rereading following an initial silent reading. Each of 17 fourth grade students silently read two 500-word selections, which were written at the third grade level, and then responded orally to 20 literal and above-literal questions based on the materials. The silent…

This study investigates the relationship between reading comprehension and eleven measures of syntactic writing maturity. The subjects were 144 third, fourth, and fifth grade students of the Travis Elementary School in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The two instruments used to collect data were an in-class composition, which provided a writing sample,…

This paper discusses the importance of an emphasis on word meaning skills as part of an objective-based approach to the development of reading comprehension at intermediate grade levels. To aid in determining the meaning of an unfamiliar word, two strands of word meaning skills are proposed. One strand concentrates on the use of word parts, while…

This study investigated the relationship between a reader's attitude toward his instructional climate and his diversity of reading interests. The sample for the study consisted of three classes of fourth grade students chosen from a randomly selected elementary school in Greenwich, Connecticut. All subjects were administered (1) the Affective…

The relationship between listening comprehension and reading comprehension was investigated with 40 fifth graders (20 poor and 20 skilled readers). (Author/SBH)

In the generative model of learning with understanding, reading comprehension occurs when readers actively construct meaning for text. On two experiments with 488 sixth graders, learning time was held constant across all treatments. The combination of inserted paragraph headings and instructions to generate sentences about paragraphs approximately…

The verbalized thinking of two sixth grade children while reading is analyzed using schema theory. An outline of a critical thinking theory is given and contrasted with schema theory. Conclusions for reading theoreticians are discussed. (MT)

This resource guide, for teachers and students in the upper elementary and middle school grades, has been developed in response to the nationwide interest in asking schools to play an active role in preparing students to become informed and responsible citizens. The guide is divided into seven sections, one for each character trait: Caring, Civic…