A study examined how specific developmental levels of cognitive ability affect the relationship between beliefs and performance; how cognitive development levels affect reading and writing performance; and how developmental level affects the interactions between the reading and writing domains. Subjects, 150 undergraduates between the ages of 18…

Three unjustified assumptions are often made about young beginners in reading: they all are acquainted with books and reading, the children and the teacher are thinking in the same terms when each talks about reading, and children understand the technical terms of literacy. Reading authorities refer to this lack of understanding of what the…

In an exploration of the comprehension process of the beginning reader, 16 first and second grade students were each asked to listen to two stories--one a narrative account and the other an expository passage-- and then immediately to retell them. Recall protocols were compared by propositional analysis for text-related superordinate and…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how children's responses to literature can help develop literacy. The subjects were 15 first-grade students at Overstreet Elementary School in Starkville (Mississippi). Two school observations were carried out prior to the collection of data on individual students. Case studies were conducted…

Items from a widely used standardized reading achievement test were rated by trained judges according to the degree to which they required an understanding of hierarchical classification. Two subtests were constructed from subsets of items that were identified by their extreme ratings. Subtest A was judged to require classification operations from…

The aim of this study was to test a hypothesis derived from the Cognitive Clarity Theory which compares Indian and non-Indian children in two localities of British Columbia. It was hypothesized that, in comparison with Indian children, the non-Indian children would show significantly superior performance on objective tests of cognitive clarity in…

Frequently a variety of visual perception difficulties correlate with reading disabilities. A study was made to investigate the relationship between visual perception and reading disability in families, and to explore the genetic aspects of the relationship. One-hundred twenty-five reading-disabled students, ages 7.5 to 12 years, were matched with…

Reading difficulties in mathematics may stem more from the abstract and highly symbolic nature of the subject than from inability to recognize or comprehend the words. A review of Piaget's model of cognitive development suggests that many seemingly simple mathematical terms assume cognitive processes which may not be available to many secondary…

To determine how children's knowledge about word boundaries differs at given points in time, writing samples were gathered from nine kindergarten children using similar procedures. Also examined were children's statements while composing and rereading as well as children's questions and information elicitations. Three of the subjects were judged…

In this research report, the influences of handedness, hand position while writing, and familial sinistrality (presence of left-handed relatives) on children's intellectual, reading, and visual-motor performance were investigated. Forty left- and right-handed children between the ages of 7 and 10 served as subjects. To assess hand positions, an…

To develop a new model of the reading process, a longitudinal study investigated the importance of the concepts of cohesion and register (fiction or nonfiction) in the assessment of text readability. Subjects, 436 8-year-olds (Cohort A), 474 10-year-olds (Cohort B), and 445 13-year-olds (Cohort C) from 23 urban and rural British schools--most of…

This study examines the relationship between IQ and yearly academic growth rate in reading and mathematics for low income children in the primary grades involved in the Direct Instruction Follow Through program (DIFT). Low income children, from 20 communities in the United States, who engaged in the DIFT program between 1969 and 1977 for either 3…

Two text-based prose grammars, the W. Kintsch and B. J. F. Meyer models, were compared as to their sensitivity to potential developmental differences in children's recall of prose. Participants in the study were 212 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students who had been classified as average or below average in reading ability. The Meyer analysis…

For the past 100 years we have been acting as if education in school was of words, by words, and for words, but in fact verbal literacy was preceded by visual literacy when humans communicated with body language before they had speech. American educators have been concentrating efforts on the left hemisphere of the brain in which the verbal…

A study investigated the development of information processing as it relates to the development of reading skills by studying how good readers and poor readers utilized orthographic information. Subjects, 90 good and poor readers from grades 2, 4, and 6, participated in four 30-minute sessions in which they were required to make a same/different…