The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) documents dimensions of quality in undergraduate education and provides information and assistance to colleges, universities, and other organizations to improve student learning. Its primary activity is annually surveying college students to assess the extent to which they engage in educational…

Past research shows that repetition results in increased learning. However, it is not clear whether repetition adds more information to memory (quantitative hypothesis), or allows the learner to use a more sophisticated method of encoding (qualitative hypothesis). This study investigates the process and effectiveness of repetition as a study…

This study examined the effects of teaching prelingually deaf, elementary school children specific strategies to use when reading. Strategies addressed the skills of inferring, predicting, analyzing, attending, associating, synthesizing, and monitoring. Five of six children made significant gains in both reading levels and specific metacognitive…

This article reports on a reading comprehension instructional technique which uses reciprocal-like teaching formats in groups and semantic mapping to make text structures apparent. The procedure significantly affected recall of expository ideas and knowledge of comprehension strategies with 28 intermediate grade students with learning…

The study examined the use of expository text structure as a reading and writing strategy with 15 learning-disabled adolescents, 15 normally achieving adolescents, and 15 normally achieving fourth graders. Two reading tasks required students to recognize sequence or comparison-contrast text structure. The third task required students to write…

Examines the relationships between metamemory and strategic behavior in impulsive and reflective children. Children in three experimental groups received (1) prose summarization instructions; (2) summarization instructions in conjunction with meta-cognitive training about the importance of a reflective approach to learning; or (3) no instructions.…

The study investigated effects of training 12 adolescents with learning disabilities in a 7-step word identification strategy (using a general problem-solving strategy with specific substrategies) and found significant gains in word identification but inconsistent gains in comprehension. (DB) (DB)

This study, with 48 students (including 16 eighth graders with learning disabilities (LD), 16 age level peers, and 16 reading level peers), found that all groups, but especially LD students, benefited from experimenter activation of prior knowledge on reading comprehension tasks testing inferential reading ability. Experimenter activation of prior…

Using the Cluster Analytic Model (CAM), two samples of graduating seniors from Georgia State University were studied to determine the effect of different patterns of college course work on their general learned abilities. The CAM uses Student Achievement Test scores, Graduate Record Examination scores, and transcripts for course work patterns.…

Using the generative model of learning, this study investigates the effects of reader constructed text headings on readers' text recall and comprehension. One hundred pupils, ages 12-14, from the Blythe Bridge Comprehensive School, Staffordshire, England, were assigned to one of two treatment groups using a 1000-word passage. The experimental…

Describes a study that factor analyzed questionnaire data and compared factor scores of good and poor college-level readers to determine the text-learning strategies of each group. Results, which indicate poor readers rely heavily on study strategies without an understanding of the text to be studied, have implications for remedial reading…

Evaluation of a metacognitive reading program with 13 learning-disabled children in grades 3 and 4 found that students increased in performance and awareness of strategies from pre- to posttesting. Differences were also observed between different clusters of students with defensive, pessimistic, or realistic self-concepts. (DB)

This study, with 30 students with learning disabilities (grades 6-9) and 15 nondisabled students, found that instruction in a 5-rule summarization strategy significantly increased reading comprehension of expository prose. Strategy use was maintained over time, and students were reported to generalize its use. (Author/DB)

This evaluation study (with 45 middle school students with learning disabilities) found that students trained in summarization procedures performed significantly higher on all dependent measures of reading comprehension than those receiving traditional instruction. Also, on some measures, students also trained in self-monitoring outperformed those…

The effect of graphic organizers on 14 learning-disabled students' (grades 5 and 6) recall of science content was compared with that of students taught identical content without the graphic organizer condition. Evaluation two weeks later found no statistically significant differences between the groups on production or choice response tasks. (DB)