Two dimensions of students' beliefs about meaning construction in reading processes, transmission and transaction beliefs, were studied. According to transmission beliefs, the reader's task is to understand the author's intended meaning, while transaction beliefs assign to the reader the role of active meaning constructor. Students' beliefs were…

Forty-three high school students (14 poor, 13 average, and 16 good readers) were given three different measures of memory capacity to determine if they differed in working memory, traditional memory span, and chunking capacity. Several experimental tasks followed to determine if differences in the memory factors were related to specific components…

Describes "rauding" (a combination of "reading" and "auding") as representative one of five basic reading processes that involves the comprehension of complete thoughts in sentences of textual material (the central process for understanding written or spoken language), requiring a certain minimal amount of time, and…

Investigates the effects which thematic preorganizers might have on secondary students' comprehension of prose fiction. Finds that the thematic preorganizers did not significantly affect secondary students' comprehension of narrative prose materials as measured over time by equivalent tests. (MG)

The aim of the present thesis was to investigate high-school students' metamemory and metacomprehension of texts. In three studies, the students read texts and then made prospective as well as retrospective ratings of their own immediate and delayed performance (i.e., measured via text recall and answering performance of comprehension questions).…

A study investigated the ability of above average and average high school students to use text structure to identify main ideas and write a summary. Schema possession of 388 sophomores was assessed by measuring their ability to organize the components of a scrambled passage. Only 10 students in the above average and 20 in the average ability…

Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, and…

A study examined the relationship between cultural schemata and the reading process to identify the strategies proficient readers employ to develop their understanding of culturally familiar and unfamiliar passages and to examine those strategies in relation to the cultural backgrounds of the readers and the cultural perspectives of the reading…

Investigating the selective attention strategy, a study examined the type of attention allocated to important information by good and poor readers. Also tested was the methodological validity of using a conceptual (word recognition) perceptual (tachistoscopic word flash) task as a means of investigating the types of information processing that may…

A study investigated the differences between what advanced and remedial high school readers do while reading a short story. Subjects were three seniors nominated by their literature teachers as being expert high school readers of literature, and three junior level students who were all reading about two grade levels below the junior level…

A study investigated how two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with readers' ability to analyze the semantic relationships and make inferences based on those analyses. In each passage, the influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words…

Current theory posits that comprehension and meaning involve not only text but also what the reader brings to the text and the contextual elements of the reading. A study investigated how eight students in grade 9 read and created meaning from short story assignments in their English classrooms. Concurrent think-aloud protocols from four short…

A study compared the effects of two writing tasks (short answer exercises and analytic essay writing) with no writing on high school students' understanding of concepts from prose passages. Baseline data on typical patterns of instruction and students' approaches to writing were obtained using observation and case studies in two history classes,…

A study examined whether or not high school teachers could name or list the reading skills needed by their students. The three skills categories were comprehending expository text, understanding content area vocabulary, and applying word analysis skills. The questions used to elicit information from teachers were (1) What must students do to…

Explores how several kinds of metadiscourse that convey interpersonal meanings affect readers. Describes results of an immediate recall test given on two informative paragraphs which contained some modality markers. Discusses possible roles of modality markers in discourse processes. (KEH)