Describes some recent studies which establish that meaningful learning can be promoted by a certain type of questioning activity, called elaborative interrogation, that leads students to activate prior knowledge and tie it to the new information. (SR)

Presents a rationale for strategy training to help teachers develop instruction in comprehension strategies for academically underprepared college students. Highlights basic components and presents strategies that have proved to be effective in helping students improve their comprehension processing. (RS)

Develops an Information Text Reading Activity (ITRA), a conceptual framework for presenting reading lessons that will engage students in reading informational text actively. Notes that the framework provides a basis for selecting and evaluating instructional activities and assists the teacher in moving students toward independence in learning. (RS)

Describes the effectiveness of cooperative learning, a technique whereby paired students exchange oral summaries of materials they have read. (HOD)

Reviews relevant research in reading comprehension strategies and cooperative learning methods. Describes reading strategy groups as an approach for content area instruction, along with practical suggestions for implementation. (JD)

Describes 10 categories of inferences and proposes a three-step procedure for teaching students to make inferences while reading. (HOD)

Describes a method of generating a flow chart which indicates the multiple cause and effect relationships in literature and content area texts. Argues that this teaching strategy aids in the comprehension of difficult text. (RS)

Presents two strategies (inverse cloze and building content vocabulary) designed to develop middle school students' language competency, thereby allowing them to forge the necessary connections between and among the variety of concepts contained in content material. (RS)

Proposes four guidelines to help educators evaluate vocabulary instruction: (1) instruction should help students relate new vocabulary to their background knowledge, (2) instruction should help students develop elaborated word knowledge, (3) instruction should provide for active student involvement, and (4) instruction should develop students'…

Explains semantic feature analysis, a technique that helps students learn a new vocabulary by seeing how words are alike and how they are different. (HOD)

Examines whether paragraph dominant readers at the fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade levels would outscore word dominant readers when tested on their ability to use context clues to determine word meaning. Concludes that this was true only for fifth grade paragraph dominant readers. (FL)

Describes an instructional technique called "creative graphing" in which students learn to reorder information visually, to interpret the graphic aids of their textbooks more easily, to highlight relationships that are not immediately apparent in the text, and to illuminate ideas for further exploration using charts, trees, stars,…

Adds mapping and summarization to the K-W-L (know, want to know, learned) strategy to produce a reading-thinking strategy, equally helpful to remedial and nonremedial high school students for content area textbooks. (NKA)

Illustrates how prediction can be used to improve content area reading, provides examples of successful prediction techniques, and encourages teachers to develop their own uses of prediction. (FL)

Describes how two metacognitive/study strategies (SQ3R and What I Know Sheets) are combined to produce one effective, efficient strategy to enhance reading comprehension. (SR)