As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

This document sets forth the design of a test of reading comprehension. The exam requires students to read passages of written English text--either literary or informational--and to answer questions about what they have read. In some cases, the questions deal with facts in the text or vocabulary. In other cases, a complete answer requires a clear…

A STUDY DESCRIBED AS THE FIRST APPLICATION OF CROSS-VALIDATED UNIQUENESS ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES WAS DESIGNED TO ELIMINATE THE EFFECTS OF IMPERFECTIONS IN A PRIOR FACTOR-ANALYTIC STUDY OF READING COMPREHENSION WHICH USED TESTS ESPECIALLY CONSTRUCTED TO MEASURE MENTAL SKILLS IN READING. A UNIQUENESS ANALYSIS BASED ON LARGE SAMPLES WAS USED TO OBTAIN…

This study investigated test-wiseness in a sample of urban high school seniors. Fifty-four academically talented black and minority students were matched on reading comprehension scores from the California Achievement Tests and were assigned to cells in a seven-group, before/after design. Specially constructed forms of the 1973 Iowa Silent Reading…

Describes a computer formula which measures readability according to how well high school seniors comprehend reading passages. (RB)

Twelfth-grade science students (n=91) were asked to read five popular reports of science to ascertain their ability to understand the scientific information presented. Results indicated that only half of the students accurately understood the scientific status and role of statements when the understanding required contextualized interpretation on…

A study examined the effects of active learning strategies; namely, visualization, questioning, and prediction, upon the reading comprehension performance of learning disabled students. Subjects were 6 12th grade resource room students. Prior to strategy instruction, students read and were tested on 3 reading selections from the literature-based…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of sentence length, sentence structure, and word frequency on the readability of textbook prose. Specifically, the study assessed the extent to which the factors, taken alone or in combination, affected the readability of two 1,000-word college textbook passages when the content remained the same. Two…

Using a recursive network transition model for depicting stories to generate two stories of contrasting structure (successive episodes organized by topic and embedded episodes organized by failed and successful goals), a study examined the understanding of the structures by having children in the third through eleventh grades rate each story…

Compressed speech tapes--recordings of a voice reading a selection at the normal rate of approximately 150 words per minute that are speeded up to as much as 400 words a minute--can be used successfully with students to provide practice in improving reading rate and comprehension. In a field test conducted with 23 high school juniors and seniors…

Highlighting the important innovations embodied in the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress' (NAEP) Reading Report Card, this report provides information on how the NAEP's large-scale reading assessment is evolving in response to changing perceptions of reading development and assessment procedures. Included in the report is an…

The 1994 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reading assessment was administered to approximately 27,400 public and non-public school students at grades 4, 8, and 12. Across the 3 grades assessed, there were a total of 96 multiple-choice, 144 short constructed-response, and 33 extended constructed-response questions. Information for…

An investigation was conducted into the difference between two levels of comprehension: that which black high school seniors bring to the reading of English prose and that which they achieve from actual reading. A pre- and post-test treatment was administered. No significant difference was found between pre- and post-reading comprehension of these…