The studies reported here are part of a research program whose purpose is to increase the effectiveness with which students acquire knowledge from written instructional materials. The studies had both a basic and an applied objective. The basic objective was to obtain evidence upon which to base a theory of the processes involved in language…

Rather than being viewed as a reading skill, comprehension is viewed as inferring the task of the writer or as discerning the ends and means of a discourse. Inferring the writer's task is to reason backwards from the product to the questions with which he may have started. Discerning ends and means is to view what is described, argued, or…

The purpose of this publication is to point out that reading comprehension questions frequently assess only literal comprehension, and to suggest kinds of questions that involve broader levels of comprehension. The publication first presents two reading passages; for each one it lists sample questions that involve only literal comprehension and…

Suggests ways teachers can provide students with practice in thinking (Editor)

A study of the effects of using the MRM (message unit--verb unit--message unit) instructional system on reading comprehension was studied using 69 college freshmen, 37 in an experimental group and 32 in a control group. Both groups were engaged in a variety of activities designed to promote greater reading efficiency as a regular part of their…

The measurement of a pupil's comprehension development from literal comprehension to evaluation focused on two questions: (1) How do we measure the various types of comprehension? and (2) How should we measure the various types of comprehension? Literal comprehension is presently measured by the recall or memory-type question. However, one should…

The building block theory of language structure, an information processing approach, is applied to the development of a model of the reading process. Specifically, the model is concerned with the amount of time an individual will spend reading and the amount of content he will decode which is determined by a series of cognitive processes involving…

Experimenters analyzed a prose passage into 350 idea units, then interspersed throughout the text pictures depicting main ideas, or both main ideas and nonessential details. For fourth- and sixth-grade subjects, pictures did facilitate both immediate and delayed recall, but only of main ideas. (Author/JEG)

Many students assessed as being weak in reading comprehension have no reading disability, but are being asked to read material above their language and conceptual levels of competence. (DD)

Swedes in four different age groups (9, 12, 15 and 18 years) judged written words which varied in three dimensions: syntactic category, objective frequency, and polysemy (multiple meaning). The subjects judged ease of comprehension of 24 words in a factorial arrangement. The method used was Thurstone's paired comparisons. A predicted complex…

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…

In this study 60 first and fourth graders selected pictures that best represented the meanings of sentences read to them. Results indicated that children were instantiating the target words with specific concepts rather than bringing to mind abstract, undifferentiated meanings. (HOD)

The development of cognitive processes is essential to the development of reading comprehension skills. (MKM)