AN INVESTIGATION WAS CONDUCTED TO DETERMINE WHETHER READING RATE VARIABILITY DEVELOPED WITH SHORT, TIGHTLY-CONSTRUCTED TRAINING MATERIALS WOULD TRANSFER TO LONGER, MORE SCHOOL-LIKE PASSAGES IMMEDIATELY AFTER TRAINING AND ONE MONTH LATER. THE PROJECT WAS AN EXTENSION OF THE USOE PROJECT 1755, "THE EXPERIMENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF VARIABILITY IN…

The purpose of this study was to determine the strength of the relationship between syllabication ability and reading comprehension. Pre- and posttests using the syllabication and comprehension subtests of the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Tests were administered to 275 middle school children involved in corrective and developmental reading…

Student teacher congruency and its relationship to reading achievement in grades four through six are explored. Two questions were posed. First, do teachers see their students in the same way that the students see themselves? Second, what relationship does this congruency have to reading achievement? One hundred thirty-eight students in fourth,…

Discusses the accuracy of the Fog Index and the SMOG grade (two readability formulas) as predicators of readability. (MAI)

Tests the effect of using written metacognitive awareness guidance (MCAG) as a tool for activating and engaging learners'"Habits of Mind" while processing authentic reading assessment tasks taken from Israeli kits of assessment tasks. Confirms that applying metacognitive awareness guidance to reading assessment tasks makes a difference in the…

Examines the ability of children to evaluate their comprehension of text using lexical, external, and internal consistency standards. Finds that children more often use lexical and external consistency than internal consistency and that the results of verbal report measures are inconsistent with performance measures. (RS)

Examines the effect of self-instruction on error detection in short essays. Finds that above average readers in the self-instruction group performed significantly better than those in a control group, and that average readers displayed a similar but not statistically significant trend. (RS)

A study investigated the development of vocabulary knowledge in elementary school children as a function of story reading for partially known and unknown words. Subjects, 43 fourth-grade low-middle to middle-class children from a rural elementary school in the southeastern United States, participated in a vocabulary checklist in which they…

This study was done to see if readability levels printed on recreational reading books were as accurate as when the Fry formula and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level were applied to them. Three descriptive passages from each of 60 recreational reading books were analyzed using the Fry formula and the Flesch-Kincaid formula. The data was compared to…

A study examined the effectiveness of semantic mapping instruction as a technique for increasing vocabulary. Subjects, 38 fourth grade students in two classrooms, were divided into experimental and control groups. Both groups were pretested for their knowledge of selected words taken from the Scott, Foresman Reading Program, Grade Four. The…

In order to investigate differences between the comprehension of high or low imagery passages of long or short length, a study analyzed the reading comprehension of fifth grade pupils (all reading at grade level). Thirty subjects read 16 passages each: four high imagery/short; four high imagery/long; four low imagery/short; and four low…

An instructional study was conducted (1) to explore the efficacy of using an explicit instruction model versus a basal approach to teach the comprehension or critical reading skills of discerning fact and opinion and evaluating evidence, and (2) to learn whether adding a functional aspect to the instruction would affect the students' acquisition…

Compares four reading formulas to determine how well each of them predicts success among a population of 733 fourth and fifth grade students. (RB)

IN A STUDY TO DETERMINE THE EFFECT OF ATTITUDES ON LEARNING, THE LITERAL AND INTERPRETATIVE COMPREHENSION ABILITIES OF INTERMEDIATE GRADE CHILDREN ON THEMATICALLY BASED READING SELECTIONS WERE COMPARED WITH THEIR ATTITUDES TOWARD THAT MATERIAL. THREE OF THE MOST COMMON READING THEMES INHERENT IN CHILDREN'S STORIES WERE DETERMINED BY A PANEL OF…

Presents a dialogue between a student and an examiner that demonstrates the difficulty of diagnosing a comprehension problem. (MKM)