Working under the hypothesis that a child's concept of a story and his or her concept of the task of narration used to tap comprehension emerge first in social interaction, a methodology was created for studying the process of development from dependent functioning in social interaction to independent functioning based on L. Vygotsky's theoretical…

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,…

In three experiments subjects (college and high school students) read passages which described psychological principles and answered either adjunct application or factual questions while reading. Questions were presented either before, after, or both before and after the parts of the passage that answered the questions. Subsequently subjects took…

In order to determine the effect of certain types of pictures on reading comprehension in beginning French, a study was conducted in which six types of pictorial contexts were used as advanced organizers for a test passage. One group of university students was given a text in French, a second group the same text in English, and a third group a set…

A procedure called the Group Mapping Activity has been used to provide for dynamic interaction of students through discussion after reading and to gauge the extent of readers' interactions with text. In using the procedure, however, it was discovered that some students regularly shifted the protagonists in their mapping. A study was undertaken to…

A PROTOTYPIC GUIDE TO READING SKILL DEVELOPMENT IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL FOCUSES ON THE COGNITIVE SKILLS THAT INFLUENCE ACHIEVEMENT IN READING. THE GUIDE PROVIDES EXPLICIT STATEMENTS OF THE FOLLOWING SKILLS -- WORD RECOGNITION, COMPREHENSION, STUDY SKILLS, SELF-DIRECTED READING, INTERPRETIVE READING, AND CREATIVE READING--AND A SPECIFIC FRAMEWORK…

A large stratified sample of university undergraduate students differing in reading ability performed a diverse set of psychometric and information processing tasks in a study exploring the role of visual information processing skill as a component in reading ability. Using a correlation analysis of individual differences, the interrelationships…

Many instruments designed to assess reading comprehension reflect instructional tasks that have not clearly been shown to be a part of the process of comprehension. If the measurement instruments are to have construct validity, however, they must be created to reflect what we know about cognitive processing. Recent work in cognitive psychology has…

The classroom interaction model is a strategy to help both teachers and students with reading comprehension. It focuses on literary or informational work rather than on specific skills abstracted from the work or skills proposed by reading texts or curriculum guides. The interaction model indicates that interpretation, application, and…

To examine the use of factual and inferential questions as adjunct material in prose learning, a study was undertaken in which undergraduate introductory psychology students used different study strategies on a prose comprehension test consisting of an equal number of factual and inferential multiple-choice items. One-hundred twenty students were…

The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…

Comprehension is a process that occurs within the reader and is at least partially dependent on cohesion and coherence. The concept of cohesion is used to show how sentences which are structurally independent of one another may be linked together. Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence, which is something the reader…

Extensive research has proven that the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain tend to be qualitatively different. The left hemisphere, which for most people is dominant, is the major controller of speech, reading, and writing; it is the hemisphere toward which education traditionally has been directed. The right hemisphere excels in…

The articles in this journal for reading teachers stress the importance of comprehension in the reading process. The topics discussed include the following: inferences and comprehension, the learning process involved in comprehension, the gifted student and reading comprehension, the cloze procedure, language clues to reading comprehension,…

The role of inference in children's comprehension and memory is the subject of this research report. An underlying proposition is that in order for a child to effectively understand and remember linguistic or nonlinguistic information, he must actively embellish the given stimulus material with his own implicit knowledge. In the experiment…