The Matthew effect is often used as a metaphor to describe a widening gap between good and poor readers over time. In this study we examined the development of individual differences in reading and cognitive functioning in children with reading difficulties and normal readers from Grades 1 to 3. Matthew effects were observed for individual…

This study was designed to determine the contributions of metalinguistic skill and psycholinguistic processing ability to children's ability to detect the ambiguity of sentences and the relationship among all three factors to early reading ability. A total of 20 first graders and 20 second graders were given tasks testing the following abilities:…

Vygotsky (1978) presented ideas influential to the "constructivist" approach to education. This approach included the "zone of proximal development," and defined what is essential for student's development of a higher cognitive ability in order to become self-motivated learners. His theory also directly relates to the research regarding the…

Since E.L. Thorndike's landmark 1917 study of the complexity of reading comprehension, inferential research has generally focused on either inference as a developmental process or the nature of inferences made during reading. In his 1930 study, R. W. Tyler established that inference could be objectively measured. S. G. Paris conducted several…

In an exploration of the comprehension process of the beginning reader, 16 first and second grade students were each asked to listen to two stories--one a narrative account and the other an expository passage-- and then immediately to retell them. Recall protocols were compared by propositional analysis for text-related superordinate and…

Reported is a study to determine if amplifying elementary reading material through the use of exemplars (based on Ausubel's theory of meaningful verbal learning) would reduce conceptual difficulty and thereby increase reading comprehension. Reading passages were developed for three different elementary science concepts with three levels of…

Items from a widely used standardized reading achievement test were rated by trained judges according to the degree to which they required an understanding of hierarchical classification. Two subtests were constructed from subsets of items that were identified by their extreme ratings. Subtest A was judged to require classification operations from…

Reading difficulties in mathematics may stem more from the abstract and highly symbolic nature of the subject than from inability to recognize or comprehend the words. A review of Piaget's model of cognitive development suggests that many seemingly simple mathematical terms assume cognitive processes which may not be available to many secondary…

A study employed mixed effects regression growth curve analysis to assess the developmental course of discrepant (n=51) and nondiscrepant (n=89) poor readers identified in third grade and retested in fifth, eight, and twelfth grades. Discrepancy status did not differentiate the developmental course of basic reading skills or reading comprehension.…

Evaluated hypothesis that cognitive antecedents of word recognition are domain-specific and unrelated to higher-order domain-general cognitive abilities in a longitudinal study of Hebrew-speaking children. Found that kindergarten domain-specific measures accounted for 33 percent of variance in Grade 1 word recognition, even after controlling for…

A study was designed to improve fifth-graders' limited use of comprehension monitoring processes during reading through a self-instructional approach. Thirty-nine average and superior comprehenders were tested on their ability to detect inconsistencies contained in short essays prior to, immediately after, and one week after participation in one…

To develop a new model of the reading process, a longitudinal study investigated the importance of the concepts of cohesion and register (fiction or nonfiction) in the assessment of text readability. Subjects, 436 8-year-olds (Cohort A), 474 10-year-olds (Cohort B), and 445 13-year-olds (Cohort C) from 23 urban and rural British schools--most of…

Two text-based prose grammars, the W. Kintsch and B. J. F. Meyer models, were compared as to their sensitivity to potential developmental differences in children's recall of prose. Participants in the study were 212 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students who had been classified as average or below average in reading ability. The Meyer analysis…

A total of 168 fourth and sixth grade students participated in a study to examine two aspects of children's ability to apply structure while reading. The first part of the study investigated the amount of detail that must be provided in order for students to apply successfully a desired perspective (schema). Students were identified as either good…

Concerned with what can be done to help produce more thoughtful, critical readers, this report first presents an historical overview of theories on the origin of language, referring to B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, and Jean Piaget, among others. It then discusses biological reasons for the evolution of language and the impact of verbal language on…