The speed and accuracy of skilled and less skilled first-grade readers were assessed in the fall and spring. Children read random lists of words and coherent paragraphs. Poor decoding skills, rather than an inability to use content to facilitate word recognition, caused the poor performance of less skilled readers. (Author/BS)

Elementary school children's understanding was assessed after they read or listened to brief texts that described a scene, explained a sequence of events, or told a story. Results indicated that effectiveness in understanding depends on the fluency with which component processes of perceptual recognition, comprehension, and memory are coordinated.…

Verbal coding and listening comprehension ability differed among skilled and less skilled readers in second, third, and fifth grades. As verbal coding speed increased, comprehension skill became the more important predictor of reading skill. Apparently, verbal coding processes, which are slow, inhibit other reading processes. (Author/CP)

A study investigated effects of regular instruction and practice with prescription reading glasses with three adolescents with low vision. Two students demonstrated no advantage in reading large print and one student experienced a decreased reading rate using standard print and reading glasses. Students preferred reading standard print with…

Reports five experiments; the first two assessed the effect of the selectional restriction requirements of verbs and the animacy of nouns on sentence comprehension, the third determined the cause of the interaction found in the first set of studies, and the fourth and fifth were self-paced reading experiments. (52 references) (Author/CK)

The paper outlines the rationale and development of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and its empirical support; summarizes two reading models (Chall's stages of reading development and LaBerge and Samuels' model of automaticity); and discusses how CBM, with its use of oral reading rate measures, and the reading models may validate each other.…

Examines whether the characteristic reading speed impairment of German dyslexic children resulted from a general skill-automatization deficit or a phonological deficit. Tests a dyslexic and nondyslexic group of boys in grade 2. Concludes that difficulties in learning to read are due phonological deficit and not a general skill-automatization…

A study examined the effects of different teacher styles on one variable related to classroom learning production. Subjects, 34 first grade middle- and lower-middle income students in a Catholic school matched by ability and randomly assigned to either an authoritarian, systematic, ordered, and controlling teacher or to a "laissez faire"…

Scores from the Stanford Achievement Tests administered to 50,000 students in Palm Beach County, Florida, were studied in order to determine whether the speeded nature of the reading comprehension subtest was related to inconsistencies in the score profiles. Specifically, the probable effect of random guessing was examined. Reading scores were…

A study examined student abilities to integrate semantically related propositions; and identified sources of comprehension difficulty for the unskilled reader. It also examined the influence of two types of relations (causal and adversative) and two types of connectives (conjunctions and verbs) on readers' comprehension, on-line integration of…

Four studies used the theoretically based understanding of comprehension developed by W. Kintsch and T. A. van Dijk to look for processes that might undergo development as a child becomes more practiced and skilled in reading so that an understanding of these processes might become the basis for reading remediation programs. The first three…

A reading instruction model that has proved to be successful with mildly handicapped students, regardless of their categorical label, is based upon three elements: curricular assessment, placement in an appropriate curriculum level, and data based instruction. For the curricular assessment, a sample passage (100 words) from each level (book) in a…

This study compared the effectiveness of intensive versus extensive courses to improve reading rate and comprehension. Subjects were 46 government employees who voluntarily enrolled in either a five-and-one-half-week course or in one of two eleven-week courses. The three courses were alike in hours of instruction, instructor, content, tests, and…

The present study employed discrete trial procedures to compare the performance of skilled and less-skilled third and sixth grade readers (N=37) on picture, letter and word naming tasks. It was assumed that if lack of proficiency in reading skill is due to a general name-retrieval deficit, then the skilled readers would be able to name each…

A study was conducted to replicate earlier findings regarding the relationships between letter, word, and text reading times and measures of reading achievement and to establish the stability of reading times measures and their relationships over a one-year period. Subjects included 150 children in eight age cohorts between grades one and six. The…