When students enter middle school, they are confronted with the necessity of learning from complex content-area textbooks. Many students find these texts boring, and they may lack the higher-order reading comprehension skills they need to tackle complex text. Yet the ability to read informational text is essential to success in middle school and…

This study examined the relationships of 3 levels of reading fluency--the individual word, the syntactic unit, and the whole passage--to reading comprehension among 278 5th graders heterogeneous in reading ability. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that reading fluency at each level related uniquely to performance on a standardized reading…

Noting that the amount of reading students do is related to their reading achievement, this booklet presents an instrument designed to measure the amount and breadth of students' reading in and out of school. The first part of the booklet discusses the Reading Activity Inventory (RAI) and how it differs from other reading activity measures, uses…

Growing scientific literature provides a perspective of literacy that is at variance with traditional points of view, which see literacy as a unitary, dichotomous, psychological capability that is learned with the appropriate educational opportunity. However, an individual is not easily categorized as literate or illiterate. While the goal is to…

Reviews Elizabeth Eisenstein's "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change," which documents how print influenced the Renaissance and the Reformation and set the stage for the Age of Science. (AEA)

This current annual report describes the progress made in the following aspects of the organizational plan; the identification of a model of reading which includes a description of subskills that may be present in skilled readers and are acquired by most normal readers, the construction of criterion referenced tests to measure each of these…

A study conducted three experiments focusing on understanding the information processes children use in learning to read Chinese, evaluating the learning differences between skilled and unskilled readers. To understand the strategies of character identification children use, participants in experiment 1, 10 Taiwanese elementary students (five…

A highly reproducible scale of difficulty of word identification tasks was identified for both good and poor readers: consonant-vowel combinations and short vowel words were learned first. Long vowel words, special rule words, and nonsense words were more difficult. Reading instruction should parallel this sequence since it follows learning…

In this investigation, the differences in psycholinguistic processing of written and spoken language and the psycholinguistic deficiencies of poor readers were studied by giving meaningful, anomalous, and random word strings to 18 good readers and 18 poor readers who were reading at the fourth grade level. It was found that in both spoken and…