Learning from expository science texts is challenging. These studies explore whether difficulties can be attributed to poor memory or poor reasoning. To eliminate the need for memory during testing, some students took the tests with the texts available. To test for the effects of reasoning on performance, some students were prompted to engage in…

Working on the hypothesis that if readers had several alternative correct meanings of a given text set before them they would select the one in accordance with their abstract abilities and intellectual maturity, a study investigated the measurement of levels of meaning as illustrated in taxonomies and focused on the applicability of the taxonomies…

A study was designed to examine the relationship between certain measures of cognitive development and reading scores, particularly reading comprehension scores. Forty-one adult basic education students, ranging from 16 to 62 years of age (mean age of 25) and predominantly from lower socioeconomic groups, were administered the following three…

It is generally assumed that students possess the ability to apply abstract reasoning to content material in a variety of disciplines when they enter college. Yet many college students have not reached the level of formal operations defined by Jean Piaget; thus they experience difficulty in coping with their work. A solution to this dilemma can be…

Twenty-three German-English bilingual boys and girls, ranging from grades three to six in Saskatchewan's schools, were used in this study which sought to investigate their reading behavior when reading English passages. The Individual Reading Inventory, administered in both languages, indicated that comprehension after oral and silent reading in…

This paper presents (1) data indicating the need to increase the percentage of higher cognitive questions in the instructional program, based upon research showing that questioning strategies are instrumental in improving comprehension; (2) data indicating that questions currently included in instructional programs are predominantly of the lower…

A study investigated whether expressive writing facilitated abstraction in language use, thereby improving reading comprehension. Ninety students enrolled in four required basic skills reading courses at a suburban community college in New Jersey were divided into a control and an experimental group. Students in the experimental group wrote…

Because analogical reasoning plays a major role in content area reading comprehension, teachers should learn to teach analogy-solving skills and to identify the kinds of difficulties some elementary students will have in solving them. Analogies are statements of relationships wherein one term is similar to another term. Relationships in analogy…

The study examined the effectiveness of a program to improve the cognitive skills of 91 hearing impaired college students. Experimental students received systematic cognitive instruction focusing on specific generalizable skills during the experimental period, several times per week, in the contexts of their regular college classes. Instructors of…

The movement away from a stimulus-response to a constructive view of memory and reading comprehension has had an impact on both reading research and teaching. Viewing memory as not simply the recollection of sensory data, but as the complex interaction of the sensory experience with its immediate context and the perceiver's previous knowledge,…

Many writers have suggested that comprehension occurs at several levels (e.g., literal, inference, and conclusion). However, many teachers spend as much as two-thirds of their time on lower-level skills such as phonics and literal-level comprehension skills. Some authors have suggested ways of assisting readers in achieving comprehension at more…

Ability to reason clearly and efficiently is perhaps the single most important learning objective common to all subjects and to all aspects of the schooling situation. In order to design an effective reading comprehension program, teachers and program planners must assess children's logical abilities. This discussion provides a review of some of…

Hypothesizing that severely language delayed children lack sufficient understanding of causal structure to comprehend stories, a reading program concentrated on developing the causal reasoning of 10 children between the ages of 10 and 12 with a verbal intelligence quotient two to three years below average. Instructional activities in the…

This study investigated the development of students' abilities to integrate information in stories as an aspect of reading comprehension. Students aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 judged the importance of key statements, which varied in their causal relations within an episode, between episodes, and in a higher-order structure, yielding three levels of…

This study compares the critical-reading strategies of 83 good and 72 poor sixth-grade readers and 96 good and 67 poor eighth-grade readers. After reading seven brief passages on social studies and science topics, the students responded to 42 statements that required either the ability to pull facts together and make conclusions based on unstated…