Finds support for the efficacy of a direct instruction paradigm for teaching children reading comprehension skills. (FL)

Details two experiments that assessed the effect of vocabulary difficulty on three measures of text comprehension--free recall, summary recall, and sentence recognition. (FL)

Details a study designed to determine the effects of passage content (schemata) and syntactic structure (clause order) on the inferential comprehension of causal relations of fifth grade students. (FL)

Concludes that students who have not mastered independent reading, who seldom receive instruction in critical thinking, and who are unprepared to engage in critical reading when required to do so, will benefit from instruction in critical listening as part of their reading instruction. (FL)

Attempts to obtain information in regard to children's willingness to skip passages when answering reading comprehension test questions. (RB)

Concludes that the reading interests of gifted intermediate grade students do not differ greatly from those of children in general, with most preferring mystery, adventure, and fantasy materials. (FL)

Concludes that, if sex role stereotypes have developed prior to school entrance, they have partially diminished by grade six. (FL)

Reports that fourth-grade poor readers were able to identify more high-frequency words in context than in isolation. Discusses the findings in terms of a context-oriented approach of word identification instruction and assessment. (FL)

Investigates possible gender bias in the Slosson Intelligence Test (SIT) in relation to reading skills. Administers the SIT and the Diagnostic Reading Scales (DRS) to 66 subjects age 8.5 to 13.5 years. Indicates the SIT was a statistically significant predictor of DRS subtests that assess oral reading, silent reading, and listening comprehension.…

Finds that engaged reading occurred in a fourth-grade classroom when students and teachers used interpretive tools to select, connect, and organize information in the text to construct meaningful interpretations and that there were cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational components to the engagement observed. (PA)

Examines the effectiveness of two intervention paradigms that treat phonological awareness and grapheme-phoneme conversion in severely learning disabled third- to fifth-grade students. Finds that an implicit learning paradigm as practiced in the Stabilized Learning System is more effective than an explicit methodological approach as practiced in…

Describes the results of one part of a two-year-long classroom study of sixth graders' engagement with and responses to nonfiction trade books. Considers what motivated these sixth graders to read the nonfiction titles they chose for small-group and voluntary reading. Concludes that when students are given the opportunity to select nonfiction…

Examines the effect of key concept mapping strategies on reading comprehension and writing performance of fifth grade students using basal reading materials. Concludes that key concept mapping enhances comprehension of factual/informative text, but has no effect on written composition. Finds that literary mapping strategies enhanced neither…

Examines the influence of pre-reading instruction versus prior experience on factual and inferential comprehension. Concludes that prior experience affects factual and inferential comprehension more than does pre-reading instruction, and that younger students need to have relevant knowledge externally activated, while older students can activate…

Examines the effects of teaching individual word meanings and deriving word meaning from context. Concludes that instruction in individual word meanings effectively teaches specific word meanings, training in deriving meaning from context improves students' ability to derive word meanings, and practice in either method leads to higher levels of…