Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

A developmental study investigated the pictorial and linguistic main idea identification skills of 104 students in second, fifth, and eighth grades. In the pictorial task, the subjects studied a complete picture story and ranked the effectiveness of four separate main idea alternatives at capturing the meaning of the story. Following the same…

The intended significance of text conventions must be understood if reasonably convergent text interpretation is to occur. If students can learn to recognize structural cues or signals, then they can group words into units with particular inner relationships. Expository text comprehension consists of integrating at least three structures: the…

Learning strategies can be defined as behaviors and thoughts in which a learner engages and which are intended to influence the learner's encoding process. Thus, the goal of any particular learning strategy may be to affect the way in which the learner selects, acquires, organizes, or integrates new knowledge. Good teaching includes teaching…

Readers as well as writers compose meaning. Using the same characteristics essential to effective writing--planning, drafting, aligning, revising, and monitoring--readers react creatively with the text. In response to the author's intention and their own knowledge base, they decide what they want to get from their reading. Constantly renegotiating…

The study with three profoundly deaf subjects (ages 11-13) investigated whether there is a chain of functional relationships among a method of interaction referred to as a mediation, a cognitive function referred to as spontaneous comparative behavior, the operation of categorization, and the reading comprehension tasks of using lexical cohesion…

Reported are a series of studies revealing developmental and individual differences among preschool children on relationships between gender-based knowledge, gender constancy, gender schematic processing, recognition memories for gender-typed information, and flexibility, sequencing, and understanding of gender scripts. Alternative approaches for…

In this paper, discussion covers three approaches to the fostering of higher level thinking in students: (1) the stand-alone approach, in which thinking skills are taught separately from subject matter content; (2) the embedding approach, in which thinking skills are explicitly taught in the context of subject matter content; and (3) the immersion…

An extensive bibliography on teaching thinking skills is presented. This bibliography incorporates from an earlier one (1989) the available relevant references in the field of cognitive education as well as new references that have appeared since early 1989. This field of cognitive education is expanding at such a rapid rate that no bibliography…

This paper examines young adolescents' involvement with popular music and the health implications of that involvement. Initial discussion explores three central concepts: music media, adolescence, and mass media effects. A summary of research on music media in adolescence is offereed in two sections discussing exposure to, and gratifications and…

The comprehension of instructional text can be a cognitively demanding task because component comprehension processes compete for limited space within the readers' working memories. The component comprehension processes that readers must perform include recognizing words and retrieving their meanings, parsing sentences, identifying and organizing…

A study investigated the relationship between reading achievement and predictive abilities for narrative text structure of 96 fourth grade and 70 sixth grade readers. The subjects (1) silently read incomplete stories and then told the rest orally, and (2) silently read stories that had parts deleted and then orally gave information they thought…

The Effective Reading in Content Areas (ERICA) teaching model comprises four stages: preparing for reading, thinking through information, extracting and organizing information, and translating information. Aspects to consider in the first stage include the preparation of ideas, text, and vocabulary. Two strategies can be used to promote reflection…

Reading courses at the college level strive to improve advanced reading proficiency as well as basic reading skills. The use of a problem-solving model is one way to provide students with an organized approach to comprehending, investigating, and resolving problem statements. The problem-solving model begins with a problem statement provided by…

Using Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956), this study explores whether the San Diego Schools are teaching and/or testing higher level cognitive skills. The Taxonomy arranges cognitive processes in ascending order in six areas; (1) recall of knowledge; (2) comprehension; (3) application; (4) analysis; (5) synthesis; and (6)…