A substantial amount of research has focused on children's reading development and reading problems, but in comparison there has been relatively little research into children's reading comprehension. This article provides an overview of the research that has investigated the skills and cognitive processes that support children's understanding of…

Everyone agrees that reading is important, but kids today tend to lose interest in reading before adolescence. In "Raising Kids Who Read", bestselling author and psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham explains this phenomenon and provides practical solutions for engendering a love of reading that lasts into adulthood. Like…

The aim of this study was to investigate gender differences in the relationship between reading ability, frequency of reading and attitudes and beliefs relating to reading and school. Two hundred and thirty-two 10-year-old children (117 male) completed a reading comprehension test and a questionnaire exploring the following areas: frequency of…

Legislation mandates that all children, including children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), be taught to read in ways that are consistent with reading research and target the five components of evidence-based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies. This review synthesized…

Reviews experiments designed to determine whether pictures have an effect upon the derivation of meaning from the text printed in children's reading materials and notes ways that pictures support and possibly interfere with meaning. (MKM)

Having young readers manipulate objects to correspond to the characters and actions in a text greatly enhances comprehension as measured by both recall and inference tests. As a step toward classroom implementation, we applied this manipulation strategy in small (three-child) reading groups. For successive critical sentences, one child would read…

Background: The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA; Neale, 1997) is a widely used assessment of reading comprehension and word reading accuracy. Spooner, Baddeley, and Gathercole (2004) questioned the suitability of the NARA for identifying children with specific reading comprehension deficits. Aims and methods: An evaluation of the NARA…

The story recall abilities of 26 dyslexic children were tested, using a story schema representation previously used in research with normal children. Comparisons within the disabled reader group found significant differences in story schema knowledge, but comparisons between normal and disabled readers revealed no significant differences. However,…

The theme of this report is that recent theory and research related to the cognitive domain of children's comprehension of stories have implications for the social domain of children's understanding of interpersonal interaction, since there are important overlaps between the abilities necessary to comprehend stories about social events and those…

Reports that children do employ semantic/syntactic linkages in comprehending text, but not so early as expected. (DD)

This experiment investigated the assumption that children's learning and retention of prose material can be differentially affected by varying discrepancy from expectation (as established by an advance organizer). It was hypothesized that a passage which differed significantly from expectation would produce heightened arousal, which should in turn…

A study explored word recognition and structural features of words as determinants of reading comprehension. Word recognition scores and comprehension scores for three age groups (6-7 years, 8-9 years, and 10-12 years) representing 1,200 children were used to examine the relationships of structural features of the word recognition task to…

Describes study which found that young children do not have an adequate concept of what constitutes a spoken word, which may partially explain why some children have difficulty making sense out of instruction aimed at helping them to process print. (JM)

Discusses the generalizability of educational research and uses the area of main idea comprehension to illustrate how a line of research can be overgeneralized and lead to unfounded conclusions and pedagogical implications. (FL)

Two reading experiments demonstrated that 11-year-old children were more likely than 8-year-old children to identify textual anomalies. Results also indicated that an age change in comprehension monitoring need not be contingent upon a parallel age change in constructive processing as indexed by modulation of reading rate. (Author/DB)