Reports the findings of a survey of the prevalence of negative beliefs about the usefulness of phonics among directors of university reading clinics. (JM)

Examines the relationship between the paraphrasing skills of intermediate grade students and their proficiency in reading comprehension and the sensitivity of three methods of assessing paraphrasing skills. (FL)

Analysis and comparison of the decoding strategies of 50 Hawaiian Islands dialect speakers in grades four, five, and six showed statistically significant differences in the strategies used by average and below-average readers in each grade and across succeeding grade levels. (JM)

Reports that fourth-grade poor readers were able to identify more high-frequency words in context than in isolation. Discusses the findings in terms of a context-oriented approach of word identification instruction and assessment. (FL)

Finds that a story mapping procedure significantly improved fifth-grade students' comprehension, but finds no difference between a typical basal lesson using a discussion of oral and written questions as a review and a story map as a review to improve comprehension. (FL)

Indicates that students who were taught by direct instruction to use specific steps in working through analogy problems significantly improved in their ability to solve analogies. (FL)

Investigates the relationship between field dependence-independence and the comprehension test scores for expository and literary text types and examines the relationship between text structure and reading comprehension. (FL)

Concludes that the fact that fifth-grade students comprehended computer-displayed chunked passages better than passages displayed in the traditional format indicates that the display device, the CRT, really made no difference in student performance. (FL)

Concludes that elementary school students had difficulty understanding main ideas of social studies passages and were significantly less skilled at this task than at completing main idea workshops. Suggests that the worksheet approach to social studies is insufficient and that direct instruction using textbooks is needed. (FL)

Describes a study that focused on measures of reading comprehension using responses from subjects during the reading process--specifically, oral reading errors. Concludes that the scores obtained adequately predicted reading comprehension performance. (FL)

Concludes that a grapho-syntactic organization that divided sentences into meaningful units and random units was comprehended significantly better by both good and poor comprehenders than was the regular paragraph format found in basal readers. (FL)

Reveals (1) some sex differences in children's reading preferences, but indicates some overlap; (2) that minority and nonminority children differed to some extent in their preferences, but had more similarities than differences; and (3) that children's reading interests have changed little in two decades. (FL)

Concludes that on an immediate recall test, fourth-grade students taught with a graphic organizer strategy for facilitating comprehension recalled significantly more idea units in a test passage than did students who had not received such instruction, but there were no performance differences between the two groups on a one-month delayed recall…

Reports the findings of a study that replicated work done in the early 1970s concerning the media preferences and reading interests of intermediate grade children. Shows that the reading interests of boys remained much the same, with those of girls changing. Both groups continued to prefer television over print media. (FL)

Concludes that students involved in a peer-interaction model and an individual teacher-student conference model of recreational reading instruction obtained higher scores on a reading attitude measure than students in a sustained silent reading and a control model. Students involved in the peer-interaction model received significantly higher…