The main purpose of vocabulary instruction is to enhance and support reading comprehension. This goal spans across the grade levels and different disciplines and is supported by a plethora of research. In recent years, a great deal of needed attention has been finally given to academic vocabulary and disciplinary literacy. To contribute to this…

Because of the importance of teaching reading comprehension to struggling young readers and the infrequency with which it has been implemented and evaluated, we designed a comprehensive first-grade reading comprehension program. We conducted a component analysis of the program's decoding/fluency and reading comprehension dimensions (DF and COMP),…

Introduction: Students' academic performance can be influenced by several of their contextual and personal factors. In some cases, it is influenced by the educational practices of their family of origin, and by parental support with homework and learning at home. Or in other cases, it is influenced by the characteristics of the students, as well…

This article focuses on the early research domains investigated by Michael Pressley, along with the integrations and initiatives that were inspired by them. These research domains include verbal and imagery elaboration memory strategies, and developmental aspects of them; interrogative elaboration; pictorial strategies for language and literacy…

Concludes that poor comprehenders may lack the awareness and the ability to use strategies that involve higher order, more complex thinking skills. Offers suggestions for teaching students to become aware of and engage in thinking skills. (FL)

Compares the performance of good and poor readers on information processing tasks. (FL)

Indicates that segmenting sentences into meaningful units improves reading comprehension through simplifying the syntax of complex sentences and cueing the reader as to the relationship among intrasentence phrases. (AEA)

Concludes that second graders' self-reports of comprehension and liking were highly related to the performance measure of error detection for good readers but not for poor ones. (FL)

Concludes that when presented stories, some of which were inconsistent because of missing pages, less skilled readers were poorer at reporting a missing page, placing it correctly, and fixing the story than were skilled readers. Stories are appended. (FL)

Suggests that chunking might improve the reading comprehension of good as well as poor readers. (FL)

Describes an effective procedure for getting "print-bound" poor comprehenders to attend actively to meaning while reading and to improve their comprehension and attitudes toward reading. (AEA)

First, second, and third grade students were asked to draw inferences after reading stories written by themselves, by peers, and by adults. The 70 subjects were divided into groups of slow-inaccurate, slow-accurate, and fast-accurate readers. After reading each type of story, they responded to six questions requiring text-based inferences.…

Reviews training experiments where the strategies trained had a significant effect on poor readers' comprehension of text. Describes the training procedures that enhanced poor readers' comprehension of text and offers instructional implications for each. (FL)

Lists the advantages that mastery learning has for students and some variables necessary to make mastery learning a reality. (Author/RK)

Transformation abilities are those which deal with the intellectual process of changing, revising, or redefining information. Scores on a measure of academic learning were found significantly related to several of these transformation ability factors. (DG)