This book examines how personality, in the sense of character development and identity, affects the way in which we read and interpret information. The first chapter deals with the question of who reads what and how they read it. The second chapter uses "A Rose for Emily" as an example of what people read. The third chapter discusses the…

In three studies subjects read two successive passages and then were tested for retention of the first. Each passage described the characteristics of a series of entities (diseases or countries) along a series of dimensions (symptoms, cause, etc., or climate, soil type, etc.). The first passage described five diseases and was organized by name;…

This book is an introduction to the psychological study of basic learning processes in children. Written for students who are not majors in psychology and who do not have much familiarity with the technical vocabulary of psychology, it has two themes: even the most basic kinds of learning are included by cognitive processes or mental activities;…

In the last twenty years, a growing body of empirical research has re-established mantal imagery as an important part of current cognitive theory. This paper describes research attempting to determine the relationship between mental imagery, reading comprehension, and reading attitude. One hundred twenty-four Wisconsin eleventh and twelfth grade…

Research findings concerned with the relationship between the child's oral language behavior and learning to read are described. A cognitive-biological approach to the child's perceptual system development is taken, and data are presented to support both the developmental point of view of language development and the point of view that the child…

This study examined the adaptability of reading rate to passage difficulty under different conditions of task-induced processing. Sixteen experimental passages varying in subject matter and ranging from 85 to 171 words were selected from a set of 32 texts rated for comprehensibility. The eight easiest and eight hardest texts were selected. Another…

The cognitive clarity theory may be stated quite simply and briefly: (1) Learning to read involved applying general intellectual abilities to the task. (2) Reading is usually a silent activity, and there are very few outward signs of what the behavior involves. (3) Children do not know the basic concepts involved in thinking about the tasks of…

The purpose of this paper was to propose a theoretical description of the print reading process based on Piagetian concepts of mental functioning and to explore implications for educators which are compatible with such a theory. The methodology employed proceeds from a general explanation of mental functioning to one particular form, that of print…

Reading has been viewed both as a product and as a process. The product view of reading is generally associated with static information produced by testing techniques. A major difficulty with the product view seems to be that reading is treated as though it is stopped in time, captured in the static scores of tests. This feature of the product…

This paper, presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Education Research Association, discusses some of the studies conducted in the area of learning from prose. The first study dealt with pooling independent sentences into groups of related sentences and preparing passages by stringing these sentences together. College students then read one…

This pamphlet, one in a series entitled "What Research Says to the Teacher," discusses some aspects of the learning process and provides suggestions that may be helpful to classroom teachers and prospective teachers. The contents include: (1) "What Do We Learn," which deals with words and their meanings, skills, attitudes, and conduct; (2) "When…

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…

In two experiments, visual and auditory memory were tested for good and for poor readers from the upper elementary grades. Under experimenter-blind conditions, no reading group differences existed for single-mode presentation in recognition frequency or recognition latency. With a multimodal presentation, latencies for poor readers were similar to…

The question of whether readers subjectively perceive the meaning of written materials is a specific form of the more general issue of whether human beings make or find knowledge. The subjectivist paradigm asserts that the first priority in the search for knowledge is the individual's awareness of personal motives for obtaining that knowledge. The…

Activities are given for a concept guide to help students improve their thinking skills through conceptual awareness.