Articles focus on the following: reading comprehension and writing; an approach to argumentative discourse writing; a didactic experiment on the construction of two academic texts; Denzil Romero's work; communication and its implication--a vision from the teaching of the mother tongue; orthography/spelling in the Real Academia Espanola (RAE)…

The comparability of computerized and paper-and-pencil tests was examined from cognitive perspective, using verbal protocols rather than psychometric methods, as the primary mode of inquiry. Reading comprehension items from the Graduate Record Examinations were completed by 48 college juniors and seniors, half of whom took the computerized test…

Summarizes research findings on the structures, codes, and conventions of television as a communicative symbol, and on the effects of television on cognitive and social development. Suggests that television viewing can induce active cognitive processing, and that television can be a potent tool for teaching and communicating with young children.…

Describes an instructional procedure based on the findings of schema research and illustrating the truth that the more students know about a subject, the better they can comprehend what they read about that subject. (FL)

Finds evidence that the reading of content area materials is done less effectively than is the reading of basal readers or trade books, particularly at the lower grade levels. (FL)

This study replicated Daneman and Carpenter's finding that the reading span test, as a measure of working memory storage and process functions, is predictive of performance on standard reading comprehension tests. It showed that reading span is related to the ability to draw inferences from, integrate, and encode text information. (Author/PN)

Reaction time and movement time were negatively and moderately-to-strongly correlated with Ravens matrices performance and with reading comprehension and performance on the California Test of Basic Skills for 20 ninth-grade girls. Weaker relationships were found for mathematics and English grades, although the direction was consistently negative.…

Reports on research that reviewed 142 current middle and secondary school content materials to discover the organizational patterns used in each. Concludes that four such patterns are commonly used: enumeration, relationship, persuasive, and problem solving. Discusses each pattern and how it affects comprehension. (FL)

The present findings imply that a readability formula is not an effective writing production criterion, even when the writer does not deliberately write to the formula. Comprehensibility of text might be better controlled through the proper use of the transformer concept (MacDonald-Ross and Waller). (Author/PN)

Examines the story recall of normal and dyslexic readers in relation to story grammar categories and suggests that dyslexic students do not have significant deficiencies in use of such categories. Discusses the results in light of the need for considering multiple processing levels and as indicating that story grammars may be of limited diagnostic…

Concludes that children could attend to texts selectively when reading or listening to expository prose, and when reading, but not in listening to narrative prose. (FL)

Describes a method to improve student comprehension of content area materials that involves three distinct readings, each followed by a progressively more detailed graphic overview of the content. (HTH)

In five experiments, adults verified sentences by reading complex information in several technical passages. Both segmenting and indenting influenced performance; however, once a text had been meaningfully segmented, the addition of indentation cues did not affect response time. Implications for typographic design--line length and margins--are…

Two experiments investigated the impact of a reader's perspective on prose learning: (1) subjects read stories from one of two directed perspectives or with no directed perspective; or (2) readers organized and familiarized themselves with a perspective before the perspective was applied to a story. Perspective influenced recall and organization.…

Three experiments (which used adults and 14-year-old children) studied the congruence between textual input at encoding and output in the form of memory reproductions. Results verified a very close correspondence between encoding and retrieval regarding hierarchically structural operations on the information in simple stories. (AN)