The purpose of this study was to determine if training auditorially would improve listening comprehension and/or reading comprehension and if visual training with the Cloze Procedure would improve reading and/or listening comprehension. The experimental reading group received training visually with the Cloze Procedure and the experimental…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a student's level of interest in a nonfiction topic affects his or her comprehension of that topic. An additional objective was to find out if the student's ability level had an impact on this interest-comprehension relationship. Three first graders (one low, one average, and one high ability)…

Three experiments were conducted that studied the effect on comprehension of words containing more than one meaning. When children were asked to choose appropriate word meanings by reading sentences that provided "disambiguating" clues, they did not effectively identify from context the less common or secondary meanings of words. (MKM)

Results of a study show that reading and listening comprehension depend on the same language processing skills and that localized processing skills, not global organizational skills, are a major source of individual differences in language processing. (JM)

Examines the influence of interclause connectives on inference generation. Finds that readers incorporate causal knowledge-based inferences in the discourse representations for sentences containing a causal connective, and that connectives elicit inferences that are based on the connective's meaning. (SR)

The purpose of this article is to document the legacy and continuing influence of Michael Pressley's work in the field of reading research and instruction. Descriptions are provided to demonstrate how he translated his data from the cognitive sciences into highly effective pedagogy. A second component of this article discusses how Michael…

Metacognition refers to an individual's knowledge concerning his/her own cognitive processes. Children's metacognitive strategies were examined in a study predicated upon R.J. Spiro's hypothesis that subjects tend to reproduce (literally recall) text information in formal situations and to reconstruct (inferentially recall) it in informal…

Reading Recovery, a popular one-to-one tutoring program that Bush administration officials sought to shut out of a high-profile federal reading program, has gotten a rare thumbs-up from the federal What Works Clearinghouse. The positive rating comes after prominent researchers and federal reading officials tried to dissuade states and districts…

As a result of the Reading First Program of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the view of reading has narrowed. Individual state's Reading First professional development programs, and hence reading teachers across the United States, have spent the six years since the funding of the program in 2002 focusing beginning and developmental reading on…

This study looked at the period when language development overlaps the early years of reading, to see how children read and comprehend complex syntactic structures. Thirty-six second, third, and fourth graders, who were considered average readers, were tested in the first experiment using a reading test to determine comprehension of individual…

According to Dolores Durkin, reading comprehension instruction can be defined as activities in which the teacher does or says something to help children understand or work out the meaning of more than a single, isolated word. Carol Hodges criticized Durkin's emphasis on direct verbal instruction and broadened the definition to include…

A study was conducted to determine the effect of a program of listening skills on the reading comprehension of fourth grade students. After a pretest, an experimental group of 12 boys and 12 girls was selected randomly from four classrooms and a control group was selected with matched pretest scores. The experimental group was taught using…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the efficacy of various strategies for improving the reading comprehension of readers with deficits in decoding and vocabulary skills. Ninety-six subjects (48 deficit readers and 48 average readers) of approximately the same age and intelligence were selected from a lower socioeconomic middle…

In this study, rate controlled speech is defined as speech that is reproduced in less time or in more time than the time required for its original production. The particular comprehension skills of interest were: the ability to detect main ideas; the ability to determine supporting details; and the ability to draw conclusions. These skills were…