Discusses the generalizability of educational research and uses the area of main idea comprehension to illustrate how a line of research can be overgeneralized and lead to unfounded conclusions and pedagogical implications. (FL)

Provides suggestions for activating prior knowledge, getting children to be aware when their comprehension is lagging, and tying it all together at the end. (FL)

Outlines seven basic concepts regarding teachers' understanding of the comprehension process and proposes several instructional strategies based on the concepts, each of which actively involves children in reading. (FL)

Discusses the results of a study that examined the relationship between comprehension ability and prior knowledge in children's recall of structurally equivalent text. (AEA)

Discusses the principles of art and provides activities that correlate art and reading and promote cognitive and affective development. (HTH)

Finds that giving students background knowledge of a subject improved their performances on a test of reading comprehension. (AEA)

Subjects read passages taken from Bransford and Johnson's materials either with or without the context-inducing title provided. The presence of the title increased comprehension and recall but had no effect on recognition. Activation of relevant information already stored in memory may not be essential to the encoding process. (Author/RD)

Comprehension monitoring was investigated by asking college students to read and answer probed recall questions about passages that contained intentionally introduced confusions. Subjects failed to report a large number of the confusions and less than one quarter of the confusions were noticed during reading. (HOD)

Describes a story grammar, summarizes some results of story grammar research, and suggests instructional procedures for developing children's concept of story and story components. (FL)

Analysis of errors by more than 300 kindergarten children on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts suggested seven cognitive factors that appear to be involved, including complexity of directions, deficits in spatial perception, and inadequate auditory memory for sentences. (CL)

Explores children's understanding of the nature of television characters by assessing their abilities to differentiate between human, animated, and puppet characters. (PD)

Reports on an experiment, performed on seven children, designed to show that children understand "here" and "there" with the self as reference point before they understand words such as these with reference to other speakers as reference points. (Author/AM)

Outlines a study in which television advertising supplied the text that college students were challenged to interpret. Explains that the language and images of this advertising posed a complex, cognitive challenge--even to these students at advanced levels of education. Concludes that information processing of television advertising presents a…

The study evaluated the relative importance of graphic and contextual information in the correction behavior of disabled fourth grade readers who were clinically diagnosed as poor comprehenders. Results indicated that poor comprehenders tended to be more cued to graphic constraints in the text than to semantic constraints. (Author/DB)

The study assessed how unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) affects processing of metaphoric aspects of word meaning. RHD stroke patients (N=25) performed similarly to left-brain-damaged and normal subjects in the automatic condition and when provided with processing strategies. Both brain-damaged groups had difficulty developing…