Examines degree to which three types of tasks affect the selection of main points in instructional texts. Finds, on average, type of task did affect the number and kind of selected text fragments, but the variation between the students was large. Suggests findings provide more insight into three ways of identifying main points. (RS)

Sixty tenth graders participated in this study of relationships between eye/voice span, phrase and clause boundaries, reading ability, and sentence structure. Results indicated that sentences apparently are "chunked" into surface constituents during processing. Better tenth grade readers had longer eye/voice spans than did poorer readers and…

This study investigated the efficacy of compressed speech with ninth and tenth grade students having reading problems. Thirty-eight ninth and tenth grade students who were reading at least one year below grade level, had an IQ between 85 and 115, and had no known gross auditory or visual defect were chosen as subjects. Three one-hour sessions were…

A study was conducted to determine if instruction in the cloze procedure could affect standardized reading comprehension test scores. Subjects were 33 high school sophomores enrolled in two separate remedial reading classes. One intact class served as the experimental group, the other as the control. All subjects were given the Gates MacGinitie…

Finds no significant differences for immediate learning for students presented material orally and those presented the same material in written form. Shows, however, that students in the oral presentation mode performed significantly better than those in the reading mode on measures of delayed learning. (FL)

The six levels of understanding used to compare the skills of achieving and nonachieving readers investigated in this study were taken from the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. It was hypothesized that there is a significant difference, favoring achieving readers, between mean total scores of achieving and…

This pamphlet describes the new Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) Essential Skills Reading Test which was given to every fourth, seventh, and tenth grader in Michigan in 1989. The questions addressed in the pamphlet include: (1) Why is a new MEAP reading test needed? (2) How has the teaching of reading changed? (3) How is the new MEAP…

Reading comprehension tests usually contain reading passages followed by multiple choice questions about the passages; but one potential weakness of this format is that the questions may be "passage independent," answerable without necessarily reading the passage first. When examining this phenomenon by assessing a particular test, the…

This study investigated differences in reading skills, scope of reading, and quality of reading between ninth and tenth grade students in a developmental English program and ninth and tenth grade students in a regular program. No differences in reading skill were found among either ninth or tenth grade students tested. There was little difference…

Automaticity training was provided to an experimental group of eight high school sophomores whose reading achievement fell below the seventy-fifth percentile on the New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills Test to determine the effect of such training on reading comprehension. The 16 subjects (experimental and control groups) were pretested using the Gates…

The primary goal of the Wisconsin Reading Task Force is the initiation and implementation of an immediate and ongoing program of statewide assessment of reading performance and reading instruction. The assessment plan looks at students in terms of two questions: How well is the student achieving in reading in comparison with other students in his…

This study examined the oral reading behavior of five junior college students of below average reading proficiency. The Reading Miscue Inventory (RMI) was used to analyze and compare the miscues they generated while reading two selections varying in difficulty. The study addressed itself to two main questions: Do these readers use a process…

Using a newspaper article about a ceremony marking the retirement of baseball player Tom Seaver's uniform number, a study examined: (1) the effects of knowledge of baseball in general and of the career of Tom Seaver in particular; and (2) the effects of knowledge of word meanings in general and of words used in the passage specifically on 10th…

The purpose of this exploration was to develop an operational guide to assist secondary teachers in adapting language experience techniques in their classrooms. After language experience techniques were reviewed and identified, they were compiled into a guide which was used in two classrooms. Inservice training of teachers evolved from this guide…