In a study designed to further define individual differences in reading comprehension, 200 students enrolled in developmental reading courses at a large urban university participated in an experiment that investigated the relationship between personality type and reading comprehension. The students took a reading comprehension test consisting of…

A study examined whether (1) there are untested indices of difficulty that can be used to enhance the accuracy of readability formulas, (2) the same readability formula can be used to assess the readability of text for mature and immature readers and for good and poor readers, and (3) some one model of the reading process or some synthesis of…

A study investigated the reading comprehension processes of gifted readers, specifically their use of comprehension strategies and their metacognitive awareness. Grade level differences in strategy use and metacognitive awareness were also examined. A standardized reading test and a metacognition questionnaire were administered to 100 gifted…

The ninth in a series of studies to improve the strategies that poor reading comprehenders use to study text began as a training study containing three components: strategies to be taught, instructional mode by which they would be taught, and the metacognitive environment for the instruction. After identifying four strategies that merited…

Noting that the new literary and rhetorical theories are concerned with revealing the constructive nature of productive and interpretive processes, this paper examines the cognitive processes in reading and writing which make them constructive and intentional acts, and how reader and writer "negotiate" meaning in light of context, reader…

A three-stage analytical reading method for the composition of informative and indicative abstracts by authors and abstractors is presented in this monograph, along with background information on the abstracting process and a discussion of professional considerations in abstracting. An introduction to abstracts and abstracting precedes general…

Working on the assumption that poor comprehenders of reading cannot retrieve relevant information to provide a context for the understanding of new information, a study sought to gather some empirical data about the retrieval of information. It was hoped that these data would validate some aspects of J. R. Anderson's ACT theory of memory (that…

Education has often created and widened the distinctions between reading and writing rather than focusing on their relationship. More recently, however, research has advanced a view that recognizes reading and writing to be instances of communication between people. Research also suggests that five kinds of knowledge (informational, structural,…

This is the final report on a research project that measured the effect of reading rate on accuracy and the efficiency of reading comprehension. At the outset of the project, existing research data were integrated into a comprehensive account called a "rauding theory," which interrelates reading ability, passage difficulty, reading time,…

There are many children, termed "perseverative," whose reading comprehension problems stem from the fact that they form hypotheses about the meaning of a text at the onset of reading, then fail to evaluate or modify those hypotheses on the basis of subsequent text findings. A study was undertaken to identify such readers and to explore…

Explanations for differences in reading proficiency should be constructed around an atlas of reading-related individual differences in cognition. Such an atlas should include well-documented "bottom-up", text-driven reading strategies and less thoroughly investigated "top-down", schema-driven reading strategies. Research…

A theory of textual processing signals--cues to guide the response of any reader to a narrative text--can be evolved from Gerald Prince's theory of reading interludes and William Labov's work on narrative evaluation. An examination of these signals in two personal experience narratives written by students in remedial and freshman writing courses…

A study investigated the theory that the affective dimension of words can have a significant effect on the process of word recognition. Specifically, the study examined whether word potency (the emotional impact of a word), frequency, and certain graphic characteristics affected word recognition in the parafoveal field under very brief exposure…

Reflecting the interdisciplinary emphasis that reading comprehension has received during the past decade, the articles in this volume deal with both the processes involved in reading and the instructional practices used in teaching it. The six articles devoted to reading processes deal specifically with the following topics: schemata,…

The phonological information provided by written words may be used by the reader as a convenient temporary storage medium and as a way of gaining access to the lexicon. Beginning readers should be able to exploit the sound-based patterning of the orthography in reading single words and to bypass it on occasion. Some words do not conform to English…