Designed to provide an exchange of ideas about children's reading comprehension, this book has gathered insights and perspectives from both educators and psychologists concerning the comprehension process. The first section of the book consists of three chapters devoted to literature reviews, each dealing with an aspect of comprehension. Specific…

Based upon a theory of intelligence proposed by Alfred Binet, this paper describes a cognitive process approach to poetry instruction. After discussing the suitability of the study of poetry as a means of enhancing students' reading comprehension, the paper summarizes Binet's theory, which distinguishes four successive intellectual operations: (1)…

The schema theory of reading comprehension holds that an active interplay exists between the reader's cognitive structures (schemata) relevant to a text and the text itself. A study examined whether children varying in reading comprehension ability showed differences in the deployment of cognitive structures--specifically, whether good and poor…

A reader's background knowledge (schemata) and purpose for reading have an overriding influence upon the reader's development of meaning. Reading comprehension also involves activating, focusing, maintaining, and refining ideas toward developing interpretations that are plausible, cohesive, and complete. Recent examinations of instructional…

It is necessary to provide a comprehensive program of visual literacy skill development to provide a firm foundation for reading comprehension. A taxonomy of visual literacy can suggest an outline for such a program. Once the student has been made aware of the desired thought processes in familiar contexts, it is then appropriate to guide the…

A reader's ability to recognize an author's top-level structure in a passage is a useful strategy for organizing textual information for memory purposes. Even without specialized training, many adults and some fifth grade children have this ability. Other children in fifth and ninth grades, and in classes for the mildly mentally handicapped, have…

This booklet contains a speech on the value of discovery learning in building a sound knowledge base. The author contends that systematic concepts (such as spatial relations) should be fully explored by experimentation and discussion in the classroom. The cognitive processes involved in solving problems are examined and examples are given of…

A study examined the main and interacting effects of pragmatic, structural, and word-level manipulations of text on comprehension and compared the results to the effects of these variables on judgments of text comprehensibility and interest. Subjects were 120 seventh grade students who read a number of passages that differed in level of…

Two kinds of memory organization are distinguished: segregrated versus integrated. In segregated memory organizations, related learned propositions have separate memory representations. In integrated memory organizations, memory representations of related propositions share common subrepresentations. Segregated memory organizations facilitate…

Research on comprehension and recall in reading has been limited in the past to quantitative studies of the amount of text items recalled. This paper reports on two experiments that used a qualitative measure in order to investigate the differences between fluent and less fluent comprehenders and the recall processes they use. The first…

Following reading and listening tasks, adult long-term memory is high in semantic information and low in syntactic and lexical information. Comprehension during reading and listening must depend to some extent, however, on short term retention of linguistic information that is less abstract and shares more features of the input than the semantic…

While semantic development has been alleged to proceed slowly, reading instruction begins early in the child's school career. Yet, little research has been addressed toward understanding how beginning readers extract meaning from the printed word. This paper reports two experiments that measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to…

Several influences upon mathemagenic activity during text learning were examined in this study, and the effects of attentional processes arising during instruction upon incidental rather than intentional learning were focused on. The subjects were 114 students enrolled in eight graduate classes in educational psychology. Six experimental groups…

The "page-at-a-glance" reading phenomenon in two gifted readers using only monocular vision was investigated. The specific questions to be answered in this preliminary study were (1) What is the average duration of fixations made by gifted readers while reading a somewhat familiar article? and (2) What degree of comprehension on materials of…

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…