Reports on a study to determine whether questions asked prior to reading or questions asked before and after reading would improve elementary school students' word recognition and reading comprehension performance. Concludes that no significant differences existed in favor of the prequestion task on word recognition or comprehension performance.…

A study focusing on anxiety and its interaction with reading explored the undetermined potential of prequestions for treating high reading-related anxiety. The research sample was comprised of 151 members of the freshman nursing classes at a large southeastern university. Evaluation materials included commercial reading tests as well as questions…

A study was conducted to determine whether explicit instructions could be as effective as paraphrased adjunct questions in enhancing subjects' reading comprehension. Eighty-six United States Navy enlisted men were assigned to one of four groups and given a lengthy passage from the "Naval Orientation Manual" to read. Following the…

This monograph is the second in a series of semiannual reports that focus on research related to reading in secondary schools. The first section contains two literature reviews dealing with study habits and study skills related to reading. The second section offers two reviews related to prereading anticipation activities, including the advance…

To test the effects of prequestions and postquestions on word recognition and comprehension, two studies were conducted involving two groups of first through fifth grade students. An informal reading inventory using passages from Harper and Row's "Basic Reading Program" was administered and the results on the lowest instructional and frustrational…

Concludes that previewing a reading selection improved the comprehension, recall, and reading attitudes of junior high school students who were poor readers. (FL)

A prereading strategy designed to predict events and provide practice in answering questions requiring inferences between text and prior knowledge were used with elementary school students. The performance of experimental groups surpassed that of the control groups on some measures while results were mixed on other measures. (MKM)

Three groups of university students read a passage with a beginning summary, an end summary, or no summary at all. Results showed that the end summary led to significantly better recall scores. Further research is suggested, using different types of summaries and texts, and different methods of recall. (Author/SJL)

Three experiments examined the effects of outlines prefacing text and headings inserted in the text on the recall of prose by 178 undergraduates. Results indicate that a combination of outlines and headings best benefit readers' recall. Results are discussed from a schema activation perspective. (SLD)

A study examined whether (1) subjects' comprehension and recall of an expository passage would improve if they were given information about the organization of the passage before they read it, (2) the effects of being given such information would be similar across various hierarchical levels of the passage, and (3) the effects would be similar…

A study was conducted to investigate the compensatory effects of graphic organizers on text organization. Subjects were 114 tenth grade students who read two versions of an expository passage containing identical information but differing in top level structure. The version organized to show opposing views (comparison/contrast) was considered…

Given the general agreement that learning of texts is facilitated by learners using relevant concepts or schemata to subsume contents, a study was conducted to see if giving learners an advance organizer and requiring anticipation activity would help in the formation of new schemata and, therefore, result in the enhancement of learning. Subjects…

Three methods of preposed questioning aimed at improving student comprehension of short stories were tested with a group of high school students. The methods were as follows: teacher-prepared, preposed questions, self-preposed questions (student-prepared), and schema self-preposed questions (embodying teacher-specified limitations within which…

This study investigated the effects of graphic advance organizers and schematic cognitive-mapping organizers upon the comprehension of 146 ninth grade students of below-average reading ability. Students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: graphic advance organizer, schematic cognitive-map organizer, and control. A 15-item, informal…

A study was made of the importance to reading comprehension of using the author's top-level organization or textual schema. The subjects, 102 ninth graders with high, average, and low reading comprehension scores, read expository passages, some of which included signals explicitly stating the top-level organizational structure and some of which…