The most recent scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 2013) indicate that the achievement gap between students with disabilities and their peers is widening and that 69% of 4th graders and 60% of 8th graders with identified disabilities score below basic levels. The Institute of Education Sciences' National Center for…

In this article, the author offers a short summary of the findings of the National Endowment for the Arts report on the status of reading, "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence", and an explanation of the guiding rationale for the study and some future areas of research that seem warranted in light of public responses to the…

Editing for clarity is essential in document design, but research suggests that even when used by skilled editors, the standard editing procedures are often limited in their effectiveness. Three experiments were conducted to explore the process of skilled editing in order to understand why it often fails and to determine what can be done to make…

A study was undertaken to determine (1) the relationship between listening and reading (the receptive language mode) and (2) the relationship of listening and reading to speaking and writing (the generative mode), intellectual ability, self-concept, impulsivity/reflectivity, and socioeconomic status (SES). Sixty grade six students were…

Reflects on the importance of observation and documentation of detail in producing critical thinking and accurate writing. (AEA)

In this practitioners' guide, a recognized reading expert explains how educators, parents, and concerned citizens can spot ineffective reading programs that may hide under the "scientifically-based" banner. Although the term "whole language" is not commonly used today, programs based on its premises remain popular. These…

Misleading headings in documents, which make it hard for readers to find what they need, are common in many types of documents. A review of research on the importance of cues in the reading process suggests that heading miscues might seriously impair understanding. Three experiments were conducted to discover how headings cue or miscue adult…

This study investigates the relationship between reading comprehension and eleven measures of syntactic writing maturity. The subjects were 144 third, fourth, and fifth grade students of the Travis Elementary School in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The two instruments used to collect data were an in-class composition, which provided a writing sample,…

Presents a model of generative reading comprehension stating that learning to read with comprehension involves acquiring and using some of the same generative skills needed to learn to write. (JL)

A study investigated the effects of sentence combining instruction on the reading comprehension and writing maturity of fifth grade children. The sample consisted of an experimental and a control group with 25 children in each group. For 6 weeks the experimental group received instruction in sentence combining, defined for purposes of the study as…

Investigates effects of explicit instruction in how to take notes during a lecture. Finds preliminary support for providing explicit instruction with self-questioning to low performing first-year college student. Finds that the quality of notes and immediate comprehension of lecture information improved. (RS)

A series of experiments investigated the role of prior knowledge in tasks involving the operation of equipment from written instructions. The experiments covered two situations. In the first, the prior knowledge was already possessed by the subjects before the experiments. The studies involved comprehension and memory of technical prose, expertise…

Twenty-four adults participated in an experiment to determine the difficulty of conditional sentences of the kinds frequently found in the instructions in government forms. The stimulus materials were 128 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press button Y," where X was replaced by sixteen different coordinate structures. These…

Reviews some of the studies, both empirical and theoretical, that seem to illuminate the changes affecting the teaching of reading and writing in this decade. (Author/IRT)