Offers suggestions on how to ask questions in a teacher/student reading conference, promote professional growth through the use of reading journals, produce a newspaper as a final examination, use modern music to teach reading and writing, and use content area textbooks to teach reading skills. (FL)

Some techniques or strategies and principles of organization can make the teacher's task of modifying or writing curriculum materials easier. This monograph provides a step-by-step guide for writing curriculum materials, whether approaching the problem from scratch or modifying that which already exists. Chapter 1 provides the rationale, and…

This critical review of "Becoming a Nation of Readers" states that the Commission on Reading report contains sensible and practical recommendations, though it is not wholly representative of all the available research on reading and it contains occasional insensitivities to the potential problems within its recommendations. The first…

Those interested in textbook research, theory, and practice need to identify the independent or context variables that influence the making of a textbook--the intervening variables that come into play as textbooks are conceived, developed, and designed--and to show how these impact on the textbook, or dependent variable. To begin, critics and…

This study examined the effect of two ways of question phrasing as related to three styles of expository writing on the test performance of elementary school children. Multiple-choice questions were developed for sets of passages which were written using three different syntactic structures; and which had different levels of difficulty. The…

This article introduces and discusses some aspects of the complex problem of textbook reform, and suggests what the future holds for textbooks. (DCS)

This directory provides information on cancer education materials that have been developed specifically for American Indians and Alaska Natives. The goal is to develop and implement culturally appropriate cancer prevention and control programs for Native Americans. The directory includes a matrix of cancer education materials that identifies…

The reading achievement test scores of 239 low-income, southern, urban black students in grades three through eight were compared with their ability to comprehend the social studies books used in their classrooms. Achievement scores were obtained from the reading subtests of the Stanford Achievement Tests. A cloze passage was developed based on…

Reported is a study designed to determine whether reading grade level (RGL) assessment techniques used for elementary and secondary education textbooks would discriminate among plant and soil science textbooks. The study was to select the RGL indices suited to quantify the readability of these sources, and to identify the factors affecting…

This document discusses in depth the theoretical background of the Lexile Framework, which is based on the assumption that reading comprehension is the best predictor of success in higher education and job performance, and that it is the most tested construct in education. The first section defines measurement and differentiates between specific…

A pilot study explored the nature of the relationship between test and classroom evidence and considered how these different sources of evidence were used in assessing and promoting student growth and development in reading. Test estimates of third-grade children in two public elementary programs in New York City were compared with estimates of…

A study investigating the influence of certain features of cohesion and coherence on Israeli college students' difficulty in reading English expository texts examined the reader's ability to understand sequences of propositions and familiarity with markers of cohesion. Three methods were used to investigate the problem: application of a…

The guide contains detailed suggestions for teaching 10 books about Indians to older students who read easily and are ready to be introduced to serious literature. The books are When the Legends Die; Laughing Boy; Dancehall of the Dead; The Man Who Killed The Deer; Rolling Thunder; House Made of Dawn; Yes Is Better Than No; The Man To Send Rain…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles include studies of an informal reading inventory; an item-type to test phonic and context skills; reliability of residual gain scores based on means for a standardized reading achievement measure; alternatives to…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 28 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) a method of individually appraising the precursory skills of beginning readers; (2) the effects of instructing third grade students in interpretive reading…