Demonstrates how cognitive style can be a useful construct in understanding why some children learn to read easily while others do so with great difficulty. Overviews relevant findings from cognitive style research in areas related to both acquisition of word recognition skill and the development of comprehension processes. (MG)

Forty-four second grade students participated in a study examining the relationships between field dependence/independence (FDI), grammatical awareness, reading ability, and training in grammatical awareness. After the children were pretested for their levels of cognitive development, degree of field independence, grammatical awareness, and…

One hundred twelve college students participated in a study designed to determine whether students differ in their relative employment of knowledge-based processes in discourse processing and whether individuals tend to be more "text-bound" and less able to use preexisting knowledge schemata when they are more "stimulus-bound"…

Of all cognitive styles, field dependence/independence (FD/I) is by far the most researched and has the greatest application potential to educational problems. Briefly stated, the FD/I dimension refers to people's ability to experience and interpret their environment in terms of a global versus analytic continuum. Field dependents are likely to…

Research involving eye movement monitoring can help in understanding the nature of the mental processes involved in reading, how these develop as one learns to read, and what processing strategies or characteristics are more common in those children who fail to show normal progress in learning to read. First, eye movement records show that the…

This collection provides a number of perspectives on the central role that language plays in reading comprehension. Following an introduction by the editor, entitled "Attention and Individual Differences in Comprehension," the following papers are presented: (1) "The Line of Sight Approach," by Norman H. Mackworth; (2)…

This report describes a program for improving the development of students' reading skills. The targeted population consisted of students in kindergarten, first, and second grades. The classrooms were located in adjoining lower socioeconomic areas. The problem of poorly developed reading skills was documented through data collected by the teacher…