Because teachers are asking for specific suggestions to help students apply comprehension skills and read content material, a mechanism that assists students in acquiring and applying specific comprehension skills as they read content texts is being investigated. The mechanism is called marginal gloss because learning activities are placed in the…

As comprehension failure results whenever readers are unable to infer missing causal connections, recent comprehension research has focused both on assessing the inferential complexity of texts and on investigating students' developing ability to infer causal relationships. Studies have demonstrated that texts rely on four types of causal…

Arguing that teachers need to provide direct instruction if they expect children to learn to apply semantic or syntactic clues as they are reading, this paper presents a variety of activities for teaching children to use context clues. Among the more than 35 activities described are: gathering clues from pictures, using a language experience…

Noting that researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics are taking a constructivist view of reading comprehension, this paper undertakes a comparison of that view with views concerning comprehension that have been expressed at the Claremont Reading Conferences over the past 50 years. The first…

Using a definition of metacognition that distinguishes between knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition, this paper discusses the role of metacognition in the identification and categorizing of students with learning problems. Following this discussion, the paper describes three types of cognitive skills training studies--blind,…

The efficient reader constructs tentative hypotheses about the meaning of the text that has been read and about the content yet to come. The hypotheses remain tentative until all related information has been accounted for. The reader then constructs a model that considers all of the details in a text. If a promising interpretation fails to account…

This study investigated how students processed information obtained by reading a passage related to inertial reference frames. Two groups of 10th-grade students (one group consisting of students identified as potential National Merit Scholars and another consisting of students enrolled in level-I biology) read a science text passage and answered a…

Based on a comparison between two types of questions reflecting a distinction among various levels of learning--verbatim or rote and high order or meaningful--it is hypothesized that meaningful learning postquestions would facilitate retention more than rote-learning postquestions. (RC)

A previous report defined a series of 14 novel measures for determining the comprehensibility of English text on the basis of current psycholinguistic and Structure-of-Intellect concepts. That report not only suggested the potential usefulness of the measures but also conjectured about the feasibility of automating the calculation of these…

A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two…

An experiment was conducted in which the story schema, an idealized representation of the parts of a typical story and the relationship among those parts, was derived inductively by examining a large number of actual published stories to extract their common properties. In addition to developing a schema that simultaneously defines the essential…

Arguing that the arts can contribute to the understanding of relationships basic to reading comprehension by providing opportunities for students to deal with abstractions and to form perceptual images related to those abstractions, this paper also contends that the arts can provide a means for transfer of basic concepts by taking seemingly…

To assess the success of third grade readers in segmenting written text into the ideational groupings judged appropriate by adult readers, 22 students were given two prose selections and told to mark each location where a good reader might pause or take a breath while reading a story out loud. Their pausal locations were then compared to those…