Concludes that thematic organizers improved middle school students' performance on several measures of literal and inferential comprehension and facilitated more complete recall of text ideas and the ability to elaborate upon implied information. (FL)

Investigates whether 7- and 10-year-old children and adults are sensitive to their own and another listener's failure to understand literal and nonliteral (sarcastic) uses of utterances. (HOD)

Reports the results of a study showing that one stylistic feature, the inclusion of connectives other than "and/then" is a good predictor of explanation in five- to ten-year-olds, but a straightforward lack of linguistic resources is not necessarily what limits older children's achievement of explanatory narrative. (HTH)

Presents a technique for remediating comprehension difficulties that is based on four principles of effective instruction that can be derived from comprehension research. (FL)

Teachers can use microcomputers in informal assessment of learning disabled students' academic achievement, math and science progress, reading comprehension, cognitive processes, motivation and social interaction. Selected software for unobtrusive, informal assessment is listed. (CL)

Examined the usefulness of conversational themes and attention-focusing strategies in predicting how people comprehend and recall conversations. Found that (1) unambiguous themes predicted conversational comprehensibility and recall accuracy and (2) personal information may be processed differently from content information. (PD)

Results of this investigation suggest that the greater an individual's cognitive sophistication about conversation, the better his or her performance in, and memory for, social interaction. (Auth/PD)

Describes semantic mapping, an effective strategy for vocabulary instruction that involves the categorical structuring of information in graphic form and requires students to relate new words to their own experience and prior knowledge. (HOD)

Concludes that entering college freshmen do not use the top-level structure strategy in reading and recalling text. (FL)

Reports results of four experiments testing whether syllable structure affects children's performance in phonemic analysis tasks and in other reading related tasks. The experiments were motivated by theories that syllables consist of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (vowel and any following consonants). (AS/Author)

Recognizing that top-level structure helps students find main ideas and recall important facts, this research review recommends teaching top-level structure from middle school through college. (HOD)

Reviews some theory and research related to metacognition and reading as well as classroom strategies such as generating good comprehension questions during reading, monitoring and resolving comprehension blocks, applying study procedures that increase comprehension and retrieval of information, and adhering to an author's text structure. (FL)

Discusses a number of books requiring the reader to examine their illustrations and pictures closely and making a visual statement that could be lost if only surface meanings are considered. (FL)

This paper describes a theoretical model for examining teaching and learning in primary mathematics classrooms. The model in intended to be both analytical--to provide insights into classroom incidents--and heuristic--to inform planning and practice. This paper reports on the elements of the model, which are based on Vygotskian theory and…