Different evaluation methods are applied in order to determine and develop the skills used for reading comprehension. Cloze is an informal evaluation method which is used to determine students' current reading knowledge, to develop their focusing skills on contextual cues and to enhance critical reading. Cloze involves evaluating readers' prior…

The behaviorist and cognitive views of learning and language are contrasted, and some methodologies derived from the opposing positions are described. Programed reading in the form of machines, kits, and self-servicing devices of all sorts and most basal reader programs are identified as products of the behaviorist theory of reading instruction.…

Sixty poor and very poor readers were given single-word decoding training either related or not related to assigned reading passages with comprehension questions. The group receiving content-related training significantly out-performed the other group on literal and inferential comprehension. There were no main effects for reading achievement.…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development of research questions in mixed methods studies. First, we discuss the ways that the goal of the study, the research objective(s), and the research purpose shape the formation of research questions. Second, we compare and contrast quantitative research questions and qualitative research…

Aimed at improving the methodology used in comprehension research, this paper analyzes the designs and interpretations of intervention training studies and suggests the implications of that analysis for future research. It points out that the typical training approach, deriving data from three sources--comprehension tests administered to older…

In these studies, the structured content overview positively affected students' upper and lower level comprehension scores as compared to either vocabulary preteaching or control (no prereading) treatments. Vocabulary preteaching appeared to be more important with science than with history materials. (Author/SJL)

In a study of the effects of time restrictions and passage access on reading comprehension, 128 college freshmen enrolled in two different developmental reading courses were divided into 4 groups of 32 subjects each. (Tests used to assess reading ability at the college level are usually either power tests with liberal time limits, or speed tests,…

The "Model Secondary (6-12) Plan for Reading Intervention and Development" has been designed to meet the cognitive needs of middle school through high school students whose reading performance ranges from those significantly below expectation through those reading at or above grade level. The reading needs of the population of students in need of…

In response to the assertion that reading is a fixed set of processes that can be identified and studied independently of context, a study was initiated based on the following assumptions: that different types of reading (prose comprehension and text search) can be identified and measured, that reading competencies are highly associated with uses…

Background: Children who have poor vocabulary knowledge are at risk of wider language weaknesses and reading comprehension difficulties, which will impact upon their educational achievement. The central question addressed in this paper is how best to teach new vocabulary items to these children. Aims: To investigate the effects of two different…

A study examined the retention of mathematical and reading comprehension skills for students enrolled in a learning-in-work environment (experience-based career education) and a traditional classroom learning environment. Academic achievement was measured using a twelve-month longitudinal design. Student performance in each environment was…

This technical report details a study to examine the retention of mathematical and reading comprehension skills for students enrolled in a learning-in-work environment (experience based career education) and a traditional classroom learning environment. (An executive summary is available as CE 027 942.) Chapter 1 introduces the problem,…

In this study, 590 third graders from 12 Dutch schools took 32 tests indicating 16 semantic Structure-of-Intellect (SI) abilities and 1 of 4 reading comprehension tests, involving either multiple-choice or open-ended items. Results indicate that item type for reading comprehension is congeneric with respect to SI abilities measured. (TJH)

Two separate research reports are presented in this paper. In the first report, we have identified through literacy research three sets of job-related reading tasks for adults: (1) those involved in getting a job, (2) those concerned with learning a job, and (3) those concerned with doing a job. National surveys have indicated that the black,…