Use of two direction-setting activities (the basal approach to develop student motivation and the advance organizer approach based on the text outline) to improve content area text comprehension with 24 learning disabled high school students was compared. Results indicated that the advance organizer group significantly outperformed the basal…

The article describes a four-step procedure for constructing two types of graphic organizers (hierarchical and compare/contrast) to help secondary academically handicapped students gain information from textbooks. Implementation methods include teacher-directed, student-directed with text references, and student-directed with clues. Testing…

Structured overviews can help students and teachers to clarify objectives in content reading. (KS)

Offers strategies by which teachers can accommodate individual differences in students' reading abilities by modifying students' experiential background, text content and mode of presentation, or assignments at three points in the reading process. (Author/SJL)

Gloss, or marginal notations in a text, and other similar techniques can be used by reading specialists both as they attempt to develop meaningful content area reading programs and as they review what is already known before attempting to learn new information. For example, several social studies teachers began their gloss activities by…

Describes an adapted form of the "Directed Reading Thinking Activity" which guides students through reading assignments with content materials containing an abundance of factual information and details that need to be remembered. (RL)

Options are presented in this paper for the imaginative use of questions in content area study. An argument is made against the stereotyped use of questions to test factual recall and for the use of questions to expand instruction in content study to stimulate higher levels of thinking and learning activities. Suggestions and examples are provided…

The effectiveness of previewing versus discourse analysis as methods of reading instruction was tested. Previewing (supported by schema theory) was based on the premise that helping students relate their knowledge to the content of a reading selection would facilitate comprehension. Discourse analysis (based on research on text structures)…

Describes a prereading learning activity designed to make comprehension easier in content area reading for students with limited background. (MKM)

A study investigated the effectiveness of using thematic organizers to increase the reading comprehension of poor readers. The thematic organizer was used to expand the readers' prior knowledge by defining the implied thematic concept and presenting relevant examples of that concept. Twenty-four fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students who had been…

Instead of urging content area teachers to teach reading skills, reading personnel should be providing them with prereading techniques designed to organize or provide experiences relevant to new concepts to be learned by students. Among the conclusions reached from a review of relevant research are that using multi-leveled textbooks in a classroom…

Motivational devices are useful in content-area reading because the content load of most content textbooks is so extensive that few if any students can be expected to understand all that an author intends to communicate. Many students who are inexperienced with the subject matter are unable to read the assignments independently. The recognition of…

This article reviews the literature on the use of content enhancement techniques to help secondary students with learning disabilities to identify, organize, comprehend, and memorize critical content information. Content enhancements described include visual displays, mnemonics, advance organizers, study guides, peer mediation, audiotapes, and…

The strategies of active surveying and active skimming are previewing techniques that may enable high school students to discover independently the macrostructure of expository materials. Research has indicated that advanced knowledge of overall discourse structure improves reading comprehension by serving as a framework for organizing new,…

A year-long interdisciplinary project sought to develop professors' available repertoire of strategies for guiding students' independent learning from texts and developing students' ability to learn from texts with adjunct guide materials in a minicourse setting. Adjunct materials included such instructor devised aids as study questions, graphic…