Third grade children are found to produce more abstract answers when asked about longer reading passages than when questioned about single sentences. (WR)

A study was conducted to investigate the relationship between understanding the setting and understanding the causal chain of a science fiction story. The 72 subjects, ranging in age from 16 to 54 and in educational level from high school seniors to those holding the doctoral degree, were divided into two groups that were labeled as sophisticated…

Reading is defined operationally as the cognitive process of perceiving and ordering our environment. As such it is a psychomotor process involving the reorganization of experiences evoked by some stimulus. Thus defined, reading is equated with perception and has several primary functions, including concept building, which begins with perception…

Continues discussion of Ronald Carter's Rauding Theory. (AA)

A framework developed to describe effective vocabulary instruction suggests that teaching methods can be described by the types of information they provide and the types of processing they require. (FL)

Describes experiments on how readers understand a narrative. Results suggest that readers combine information about the characters, events, and places with information about their order of mention in order to assign referents and that this is part of the process of constructing a model that represents the narrative description. (SED)

Reviews materials that teachers and students can use to help build knowledge of topics and word meanings that are essential to reading comprehension. (FL)

Argues that basing comprehension questions on story grammar will help students develop story schema. (FL)

The purpose of this study was to identify cognitive processing activities that produce text learning in the absence of instructions to learn. (HOD)

Immediate post-testing of high school students after they studied a prose passage improved their memory significantly. (JD)

Discusses the relative contribution of several theoretically relevant skills and abilities in accounting for variance in both word reading and text comprehension. Data is presented from two waves of a longitudinal study. Shows there is a dissociation between the skills and abilities that account for variance in word reading, and those that account…

Explores the question of when second language readers use their first language cognitive resources and how this cognitive use of the first language helps them comprehend a second language text. (Author/VWL)

Effect of domain distance on comprehension and memory of scientific passages was investigated through use of near and far analogies read by 193 adults. Results suggest that analogies from far domains promote comprehension and memory. Results support the concept of structure mapping as the underlying process in analogy use. (SLD)