This study investigated preschool children's understanding of the words "know" and "guess." Subjects for the study were 48 male and female preschool children ranging in age from 3.6 to 6.6 years. The children were divided into three age groups representing one year intervals. The task for the study involved a "guessing" game in which a colored…

A series of three experiments with suburban elementary students tested the facilitative effect of metaphors on children's ability to understand and remember what they read. In the first study, sixth grade students read two unfamiliar passages and were able to recall metaphoric structures better than literal paraphrases of the same information. In…

Understanding ideas, drawing inferences, and recognizing the author's organization and purpose are teachable comprehension skills. Prereading discussions can stimulate students to think before reading, to survey the material, and to raise questions which focus attention while reading. A study guide can develop comprehension through careful…

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,…

This paper presents a study of age differences in children's plan interpretations, interpretations of the interrelationship between actions, goals and outcomes. It is suggested that developmental differences exist which affect children's ability to recognize the necessity for internal and external consistency before labeling behaviors as…

This booklet contains eight chapters related to instructional competence in reading:"The Setting for Instructional Competence,""Reading Readiness,""Word Recognition,""Comprehension,""Instructional Materials,""Classroom Diagnosis,""Approaches to Teaching," and "Evaluation." Among the topics discussed are: keeping current in reading, professional…

This study investigated the development of story recall in elementary school children through development of a model of story comprehension which specified both the rules for informational transformations and elaborations and the nature of the organizational structure of stories. Using Rumelhart's (1974) schema for analyzing stories in terms of a…

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,…

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…

Forty randomly selected school children, in four treatment groups of ten each (each comprised of children from the 5, 8, and 12 year age levels) participated in a study to determine the extent to which the capacity for information processed by a child increases in amount with development. Apprehension span (perception and transformation of aural…

A conceptual category approach to the study of the comprehension of natural language is presented as an alternative to previous approaches made solely in terms of information gain or specific linguistic variables. Elementary school children between the ages of 6 and 11 years were given a referent identification task to test their comprehension of…

Schools have been paying too much attention to intellect alone, ignoring the total development of the student as a whole. Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in the cognitive domain categorizes knowledge into knowledge of specifics, knowledge of ways and means of dealing with specifics, and knowledge of the universals and abstractions in a…

A course that capitalizes on individual and group experiences and encourages students to expand their powers of observation and discernment is presented in the course, students analyzing their thoughts and translate them into written responses. The performance objectives are: A. Given opportunities to experience sensory and emotional stimuli,…

In this study comprehension of sentences describing two events occurring simultaneously or in sequence was assessed in 5-, 7- and 9-year-old children. The sentences were at three different levels of linguistic complexity, differing only in whether simultaneity or sequentiality was described. Subjects were kindergarten, second, and fourth grade…