Students entering high school face many new academic challenges. One of the most important is their ability to read and understand more complex text in literature, mathematics, science, and social studies courses as they navigate through a rigorous high school curriculum. The Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Northwest conducted a study to…

This report presents early findings from the Enhanced Reading Opportunities (ERO) study--a demonstration and rigorous evaluation of two supplemental literacy programs that aim to improve the reading comprehension skills and school performance of struggling ninth-grade readers. focuses on the first of two cohorts of ninth-grade students who will…

Secondary schools--be they middle schools or high schools--are reading-rich environments. Secondary schools provide contexts in which students must regularly read and write competently to demonstrate their literacy achievement. In any given semester, there are short stories and novels to read, comprehend, and analyze; civics and science texts…

Studies the reading comprehension of high school students who read three expository passages of increasing difficulty. Finds that the two groups use the same type and number of strategies on the easy passage, but as the passage difficulty increased, good comprehenders use more types of strategies and use strategies more often than the poor…

Explores the impact of an author supplied analogy on students' comprehension of a high school biology text passage. Finds that, on a short essay measure, there was no significant difference in comprehension between those students who read a passage including the analogy and those whose passage did not include the analogy. (RS)

A technique for measuring comprehension of lengthy prose is presented. The "textual segmentation" procedure requires subjects to partition text into complete, meaningful units such as paragraphs, chapters, and books. Potential applications of textual segmentation include measurement of reading comprehension, readability, and criteria for…

Investigates text cues and comprehension strategies used by competent readers comprehending lengthy written arguments. Finds that both text structure and signaling in introductions and conclusions consistently influenced the 12th-grade advanced placement English students' responses. Notes that these cues helped students recognize the argument…

Examines the effects of prior topic knowledge and vocabulary knowledge on tenth graders' recall of different aspects of passage content in a magazine article about a baseball ceremony. Finds that domain knowledge and vocabulary have independent effects on comprehension and that these effects are on what is comprehended as well as how much is…

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…

Assesses prior knowledge and involvement in high school readers whose backgrounds would seem to match the possible interpretations of an ambiguous text. Finds that (1) prior knowledge resulting from actual group membership exerted only a modest effect on interpretation; (2) readers' level of involvement predicted text interpretation reliably; and…

A study investigated the role of prior knowledge in ambiguous text interpretation by directly measuring readers' knowledge of, and level of involvement with, three distinct topical domains that could be assigned during reading of an ambiguous passage. Subjects, 52 athletes of average or above average reading ability competing in one of three…

A study researched the differential uses readers make of analogic and visual prompts for understanding and remembering complex prose. Fifty-two eleventh grade students with average and above average reading ability enrolled in a comprehensive high school in central Georgia participated in the study. They were ranked according to their ability to…

Thirty eleventh-grade students were the subjects of a study to determine whether a person reporting a high degree of mental imagery in reading would also score well on comprehension tests and report a positive attitude toward reading. Subjects were first given the Estes Reading Attitude Scale, the results of which indicated no significant…

Concludes that adjunct questions can significantly improve low achieving high school students' reading comprehension. (FL)

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…