Two groups of 12-year-old ethnic minority (EM) users of alphasyllabary (66 Tibetan and 45 Yi) were compared with 42 Han Chinese students in comprehending Chinese narrative and expository texts, each with inferential questions requiring short open-ended written answers. Three constructs (verbal working memory, orthographic and sentential…

The Reading, Engaging, and Learning project (REAL) investigated whether a classroom intervention that enhanced young children's experience with informational books would increase reading achievement and engagement. Participants attended schools serving low income neighborhoods with 86% African American enrollment. The longitudinal study spanned…

Four experiments examined the effect of pictures on the recall of expository prose by 171 first graders and 97 third graders. Results consistently demonstrate that representational pictures can facilitate recall of illustrated and unillustrated prose information by children as young as those in the first grade. (SLD)

A study was conducted to (1) examine the relation of syntactic complexity to mode of discourse in the writing of eighth and twelfth grade students; (2) determine to what extent variations observed were related to grade level, socioeconomic status, and race; and (3) determine to what extent the syntactic complexity achieved on a rewriting task…

Discourse can be organized in many different ways, two of these being comparison and a collection of descriptions. These two discourse types correspond to schemata that vary in their organizational components, and these differences can be expected to produce differences in the processing of text. For example, research has shown that for young…

A study with 28 fourth graders, 30 eighth graders, and 30 college students demonstrates that the relationship between knowledge of the requirements of a globally coherent essay and the ability to produce such an essay generally remains statistically significant when the effect of grade level is removed. (SLD)