This study addressed whether students could change their reading rate when presented with two clearly explicated purposes for reading. Results indicated that students could adapt their reading rate to fit different purposes but that passage difficulty affected the degree of flexibility. (Author/GK)

Undergraduates read a prose passage and were tested on its contents. Difficulty, permission to underline key phrases, and financial motivation were varied. Non-highly motivated subjects performed better on the easy version; underlining aided highly motivated subjects and those reading the difficult version. (Author/RD)

Four levels of notetaking (summary, paraphrase, verbatim, and letter search) were used to control depth of processing of a prose passage with high school students, who then either reviewed their notes or read an interpolated text. Results favored groups with deeper levels of processing on two post-tests. (Author/RD)

In three experiments subjects (college and high school students) read passages which described psychological principles and answered either adjunct application or factual questions while reading. Questions were presented either before, after, or both before and after the parts of the passage that answered the questions. Subsequently subjects took…

Differences among test item writers and among different rules for writing multiple choice items were investigated. Items testing comprehension of a prose passage were varied according to five factors: (1) information density of the passage; (2) item writer; (3) deletion of nouns, as opposed to adjectives, from the sentence in order to construct…

Using informal, objectives-based, or linguistic methods, three elementary school teachers and three experienced item writers developed criterion-referenced pretests-posttests to accompany a prose passage. Item difficulites were tabulated on the responses of 364 elementary students. The informal-subjective method, used by many achievement test…