This study explored 6th grade students reading of science text on the iPad to better understand how students with varying strengths of comprehending text and current academic abilities interpret text on their iPads. Our study sample compared three students with strong reading scores based on informal reading inventories, standardized tests, and…

This study investigated the role of strategy instruction and working memory capacity (WMC) on word problem solving accuracy in children with (n = 100) and without (n = 92) math difficulties (MD). Within classrooms, children in Grades 2 and 3 were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: verbal-only strategies (e.g., underlining…

Three experiments investigated a characteristic of the propositions that underlie sentences. For some of the sentences tested, the same concepts occurred repeatedly across the underlying propositions; for others, concepts were seldom repeated. Repetitions were shown to facilitate sentence processing. (Author/RM)

This study examined the short term recall of serially presented verbal information by 49 prelingually deafened and 39 hearing students (mean grade level 6). Findings suggest that neither discrepancy in the ordered short-term recall of verbal materials nor discrepancies in reading comprehension are directly assignable to differences in memory…

A study is reported in which short-term memory capacity, estimated by a probe digit task, and memory for structured language, measured by a probe discourse task, were investigated in an experiment with third and fifth grade IQ-matched children representing two levels of reading comprehension skill. (Author/RM)

This study examined how people use inferences to aid comprehension of connected discourse. (Author/RM)

The role of imagery formation as a mnemonic device in drawing valid inferences from a prose passage was studied. The 72 undergraduate subjects were divided into two groups: one given instructions to form images for the objects discussed in the text, the other given instructions to repeat each sentence five times. Half the passages consisted of…

Comprehensibility ratings and sentence-by-sentence reading times of three-sentence narratives (triples) were studied as a function of the coherence of a triple. In both experiments, reading times did not differ for first sentences, but were longer for third sentences of unrelated than for related triples. (Author/RM)

French sentences with a long ambiguous word just before a target phoneme led to faster reaction times than did sentences with a short unambigous word just before the target phoneme. (Author/SW)

Conventional paragraph structure requires that the topic sentence be presented first, followed by connected, coherent sentences. The processing role of these rules was investigated by comparing performance on reading simple passages that conformed to or violated conventional paragraph organization. (Author/SW)

A schema-based framework for representing knowledge and prose organization was studied. Testing of a script pointer and tag hypothesis confirmed that memory discrimination is better for atypical actions in a passage than for typical script actions and that there is no memory discrimination for very typical actions. (SW)

Recent research in the area of prose comprehension is reviewed, including factors that affect amount of recall, representations of text structures, and use of world knowledge to aid comprehension. The need for more information processing models of comprehension is emphasized. Elaboration is considered important for comprehension and retention.…

A study examined the effects of pictorial and verbal illustrations on the initial learning and long term retention of written instruction. Subjects were eighth and ninth grade students randomly assigned to one of two text conditions (literal or analogous instructions) under one of four pictorial conditions (no picture, functional drawing,…

A study examined the ability of 16 children in kindergarten, grade 2, and grade 4 to draw inferences based on the content of a narrative passage and to recognize inferences as derived from, rather than given by, text. An inference task, developed to assess the ability to make and recognize appropriate inferences, consisted of four orally presented…