The purpose of this study was to compare the responses of students to three techniques of teaching literature: silent reading, solo performance, and readers theatre. Three hundred seventy-one students in three classes each in ninth and eleventh grades in three high schools in the north Texas area received three presentations of three short…

The test developed in this study was a 60 item multiple-choice test. Content validity was established by the use of The Barrett Taxonomy of Cognitive and Affective Dimensions of Reading Comprehension as a basis for the test construction. Items were selected to represent subtypes in each of the five major areas of the taxonomy. Construct validity…

A sample of 180 students in fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grades participated in a study of the effect of age on the precision of interpretation of metaphorical language. All students read at or above fourth grade level. Metaphorical-language interpretation ability was measured by a 38-item instrument developed by the investigator using…

The hypothesized relationship between an individual's age, educational background, and ability to understand aspects of semantic ambiguity was investigated in this study. The 90 subjects included ten students in each of grades two, four, six, eight, and ten, as well as ten college undergraduates, ten graduate students, ten high school graduates,…

This work is intended to find replies to practical questions, such as how well native speakers of Spanish are decoded by native speakers of English, which errors interfere with decoding by the listener, and what the implications of the study might be for teaching. Fifteen Chileans were asked to tell stories in English, and several panels of native…

This research project was conducted at a high school in a suburban metropolitan area in the Midwest from August 21, 2006 through October 26, 2006. The purpose of the research was to improve student achievement and motivation through the posting and communicating of daily learning objectives. The research participants included 150 students and five…

To determine how comprehension of the Kuder General Interest Survey (KGIS) was affected by alternate modes of inventory administration and reading levels of eighth grade students (as determined by the California Tests of Basic Skills vocabulary scores), 153 students were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups--standard administration,…

The cognitive levels of 60 children from grades one, three, and five were compared with their linguistic performance on selected examples of similes and metaphors. Cognitive level was measured using Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices; a new instrument was developed to assess children's linguistic performance. Results indicated a significant…

Quantitative and qualitative aspects of the reading of narrative and expository materials were studied in a sample of 47 eighth-grade students. Informal Reading Inventories were developed from narrative and expository materials in use in the students' school, as were longer narrative and expository passages for miscue analysis. Passages were…

This report describes a program for improving students' depth of understanding through the use of alternative assessment. The targeted population consisted of students at one elementary, one junior high, and two high schools in two growing middle class communities in northern Illinois. Lack of student understanding was documented through teacher…

The major purpose of this study was to investigate developmental patterns of understandings of four types of selected phenomena possessed by economically and racially different boys and girls. A total of 64 boys and girls, 32 blacks and 32 whites, were selected from Head Start, kindergarten, nursery, and primary schooling environments and then…

In order to investigate the factors that affect the ability of children to decode and elaborate television information, a study was conducted in which verbal ability, spatial ability, and amount of home television viewing were examined, along with viewer attention and three levels of instruction, for their direct and interactive effects on…

A statistical analysis was conducted to investigate and evaluate the relationship of English comprehension levels of foreign students with their graduate academic performances at the Naval Postgraduate School. In this study, English comprehension level test scores of foreign students were correlated with the final academic grades received at the…